Quantum-Safe Certificates

[fco-code-org]

Hello,

Looking at Quantum-Safe Certificates, my undersanding is that there is no standard yet for PQC X509 certificates.

There are some candidates like:

• Hybrid certificates also known as Catalyst or X.509 Alternative
• Chameleons
• Composites : a clean break from X.509
• Merkle Tree certificates

Is my understanding correct ?
Among the candidates: any favorite ?

Best Regards.

[primetomas]

I say there are standards.

• X.509 Alternative is an ITU-T standard, i.e. X.509. There is an old draft named catalyst, but X.509 is certainly a standard.
• plain non-hybrid certificates are "almost" standardized in https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-lamps-dilithium-certificates/. It will be an RFC soon, the certificate format will not change from the draft.

Composites and Chameleons are just draft as you say. Composities is moving ahead though, but perhaps not ready for production usage quite yet.

Plain, non-hybrid/composite certificates is my current favorite. It just continues from RSA/EC without architectural changes. For hyrbid forms it will be interesting to see the actual take up, but from my viewpoint it looks like both X.509 Alternatives and Composities have a chance of becoming actually used. And yes, that does complicate PKI even more which is not really desirable.