Merkle Tree Certificates and the next phase of the WebPKI
Presented by: Christopher Patton
Originally aired on October 24 @ 1:30 AM - 2:00 AM EDT
Cloudflare has been experimenting with Chrome on the next-generation architecture for post-quantum authentication for the web: Merkle Tree Certificates. Recent developments in quantum technology have led us to expedite the deadline for completing our transition to post-quantum cryptography to 2029. This forces us to shift our focus from harvest-now, decrypt-later attacks to protecting authentication systems from quantum attackers. The cost of post-quantum authentication is the sheer size of digital signatures compared to their classical counterparts, so the primary goal of Merkle Tree Certificates is to reduce the number of signatures needed to establish a connection to a website. In this session, learn about the current deployment status of this new architecture and what clients and site operators need to do to prepare.
English
