MITRE rated eight categories of enterprise technology on their readiness for post-quantum cryptography and found post-quantum key establishment in general release in five of them. The Post-Quantum Cryptography Coalition, a group MITRE co-founded in 2023, published the PQC Capability Development Report on October 15, 2026.
MITRE found post-quantum digital signatures in general release in only two categories, code signing and the management of public key infrastructure and certificate authorities (PKI/CA), the systems that issue and track digital certificates. In no category did it find a general-release product that ran its post-quantum functions through a module validated under FIPS 140-3, the U.S. government standard for cryptographic modules.
Under Executive Order 14412, signed in June, U.S. federal agencies must move their high-value assets and high-impact systems to post-quantum key establishment by the end of 2030 and to post-quantum signatures by the end of 2031.
Disclosure: Quantum Observer’s Editor-in-Chief Marin Ivezic is the founder and CEO of Applied Quantum, a quantum systems integration and consulting firm, and the author of its PQC Migration Framework.
How MITRE rated the technologies
MITRE rated each technology on two tracks. For confidentiality, it tracked key establishment, the step in which two systems agree on a secret key to encrypt their traffic. For authentication, it tracked digital signatures, the mechanism that verifies who sent data and that nobody altered it.
MITRE assigned its Integration level where a general release fully available to the public supports post-quantum cryptography. It reserved its top rung, Validated Integration, for a general release that performs its post-quantum functions through a FIPS 140-3 validated module.
NIST had already validated software modules that include ML-KEM, the key-establishment standard formerly known as CRYSTALS-Kyber, before MITRE gathered its evidence in July. They included the Go Cryptographic Module and AWS-LC 3, validated under certificates #5247 and #5298. To award the top rung, MITRE needed evidence that a general-release product in a category performs its post-quantum functions through such a module.
Limits of the evidence
For each technology, MITRE recorded the highest level it observed in vendor blogs, product documentation, press releases, release notes, and published standards. It wrote that it searched without starting from a pre-selected list of vendors or products. MITRE put the report through a peer review and comment period in August and September.
MITRE wrote that the report is not an independent evaluation of product security and that it relied on claims made by vendors and other technology sources. It also cautioned against reading the report as a list of the most significant products or vendors in any area. MITRE did not track specific key sizes or separate hybrid deployments from purely post-quantum ones.
Key establishment
In browsers, MITRE found that most major platforms support hybrid key establishment, mainly X25519MLKEM768, a scheme that pairs the classical X25519 exchange with ML-KEM. Several major browsers enable it by default. MITRE found no mainstream browser support for the larger ML-KEM-1024 parameter set or for purely post-quantum key establishment in TLS, the protocol that secures web traffic.
MITRE also rated web servers, VPNs, and cloud service connectivity at Integration for key establishment. It named no vendors in those sections of the report. In the reference list, MITRE cited material from NGINX, F5, Microsoft, and IBM on web servers, from Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Cisco, and OpenVPN on VPNs, and from AWS, Cloudflare, IBM Cloud, and Istio on cloud connectivity.
MITRE rated key establishment below general release in one category, volume encryption, where it found post-quantum support only in components. Some volume-encryption products depend on trusted platform modules (TPMs), the security chips that store a computer’s keys and attest to how it booted. MITRE wrote that post-quantum TPMs are planned but not yet commercially available.
Signatures and certificates
In code signing, MITRE found support for ML-DSA, the signature standard formerly known as CRYSTALS-Dilithium, on some platforms. It cited sources that included Cisco, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.1, Android 17, AWS Private CA, and Microsoft Active Directory Certificate Services.
For PKI/CA management, MITRE found ML-DSA certificate issuance in enterprise deployments, citing material from Keyfactor, Microsoft, and DigiCert. It cited Keyfactor and DigiCert for issuance with SLH-DSA, the hash-based standard formerly known as SPHINCS+.
DigiCert wrote in its documentation that its CertCentral service does not yet issue public CA certificates with post-quantum algorithms.
MITRE rated the software that checks post-quantum certificates lower. It found no browser support for validating post-quantum signatures on X.509 certificates, the standard format for web certificates. For web servers, it found post-quantum authentication only in custom builds.
In VPNs, MITRE found no integrated post-quantum authentication of endpoints. For cloud service connectivity, it rated signatures at Preliminary Integration, one level below general release, after finding only an experimental ML-DSA deployment on long-lived TLS connections.
MITRE also cautioned that pairing a classical signature with a post-quantum one does not by itself establish secure hybrid authentication. It cited RFC 9955, an informational document on hybrid signature design that the Internet Engineering Task Force published in July 2026. Its authors discuss stripping attacks, in which an attacker removes one of the two signatures.
Hardware TPMs
MITRE rated platform assurance, the hardware roots of trust behind secure and measured boot, at Components Available for signatures, the level for support that exists only in specialized components. It found support for all ML-DSA parameter sets in firmware TPMs, software versions of the chip, including one from wolfSSL.
The Trusted Computing Group, the industry body that writes the TPM standard, added ML-KEM and ML-DSA to its TPM 2.0 specification in March 2026. As of July, MITRE found no evidence of commercially available post-quantum hardware TPMs, or of post-quantum cryptography in mainstream trusted boot, measured boot, or remote attestation workflows.
Update, November 12, 2026: MITRE posted its own copy of the report on November 5, naming Christina Luke, Moses Liskov, Aishu Vinod, and Becky Powell as its authors.
