- Recent quantum computing breakthroughs prompted Cloudflare to accelerate its post-quantum roadmap
- The security provider is targeting full security coverage by 2029
- Cloudflare is prioritizing authentication over harvest-now/decrypt-later attacks
Cloudflare is accelerating its post-quantum security roadmap, setting a 2029 target to fully protect its platform — including authentication — in response to recent research breakthroughs that suggest quantum computing's most dangerous milestone is arriving sooner than expected.
Senior product director Sharon Goldberg told Fierce the company had already largely completed upgrades to protect against so-called harvest-now/decrypt-later attacks, where adversaries collect encrypted data today and decrypt it later once quantum computers are capable enough.
Now, Cloudflare is pivoting its focus to a more immediate threat: an attacker armed with a quantum computer who can actively break into systems.
"Authentication is the bigger concern now," Goldberg said. "If quantum computers can forge access credentials, an adversary can log into systems they're not supposed to have access to, or compromise software updates."
That distinction matters for telcos and critical infrastructure operators. A passive eavesdropping attack leaks data. A broken authentication system hands an attacker the keys to the entire infrastructure.
What changed
The shift comes after two announcements last month. Google disclosed a significant improvement to a quantum algorithm for breaking elliptic curve cryptography — widely used to secure internet traffic. Then, startup Oratomic published a resource estimate showing that breaking RSA-2048 and P-256 encryption could require as few as 10,000 qubits on a neutral atom computer, a shockingly low figure compared to prior estimates, according to a post on the Cloudflare blog Tuesday morning.
Neither company revealed full technical details, and research could be going on elsewhere in secret that's even more advanced, Goldberg said.
"We don't know what's going on in research labs," she said. "If it's a nation state doing this for their own reasons, they're not going to make announcements."
IBM's quantum safe team has said it now foresees quantum attacks as a realistic possibility as early as 2029. Google has already accelerated its own internal post-quantum migration timeline to that same year, Cloudflare said.
The authentication problem
For most of the industry's post-quantum work to date, the focus has been on encryption — specifically on protecting data in transit from future decryption. That threat model assumes the attacker is patient: collect now, decrypt later. Authentication has been a lower priority because forging credentials requires a working quantum computer in the present, not a future one.
Recent research shifts that calculus.
"An imminent Q-Day flips the script," Cloudflare's blog states. "Data leaks are severe, but broken authentication is catastrophic."
And agentic AI makes authentication even more critical than it already is. Soon, authentication won't just be used for human users; authentication will be used to control access for the exploding number of AI agents operating on behalf of humans.
Why telcos need to act now
For telecom operators, the stakes go beyond data confidentiality. Critical infrastructure runs on authentication — remote access, software updates, API keys, code-signing certificates. A functioning quantum computer in adversarial hands could silently compromise any of those access point, Goldberg said.
NIST has set a 2030 deadline for deprecating RSA and other quantum-vulnerable cryptographic standards. Goldberg said recent breakthroughs have made that deadline feel less theoretical.
"The question up until recently was whether the industry would really meet that NIST goal," she said. "Now people are taking it very seriously."
Migrating to post-quantum authentication is a multi-year project with complex dependencies. Organizations must not just add support for new cryptographic standards — they must disable old vulnerable ones and rotate any credentials that may have been exposed.
"If there is a break to the cryptography used to authenticate into infrastructure, then adversaries will be able to get into the infrastructure and control it," Goldberg said.
The regulatory signal
The National Institute of Standards and Technology set a 2030 deadline for deprecating RSA and other quantum-vulnerable standards. Until recently, there was genuine industry uncertainty about whether that deadline would be taken seriously or quietly ignored. Goldberg said the research announcements have changed the mood.
"I think right now what we're seeing is that people are taking that NIST deadline very seriously," she said.
Cloudflare says post-quantum upgrades will be available to all customers at no additional cost and will be turned on by default — a deliberate strategy, the company argues, because default-on is the only way to protect internet infrastructure at scale.
For telcos and critical infrastructure operators, Cloudflare's recommendation is to make post-quantum readiness a non-negotiable requirement in any new procurement, assess the exposure created by critical third-party vendors and prioritize the rotation of long-lived keys. The dependency chains in large federated systems — a description that fits most telecom infrastructure — mean the work cannot be compressed into a sprint. It has to start now.
"Upgrading cryptography is really hard, and it takes a long time," Goldberg said. "It's not something you can do in a year or a quarter. This is a multi-year project that's going to take a lot of time and a lot of focus."