Post-Quantum Cryptography at Red Hat
How Red Hat is preparing its portfolio for the quantum era — protecting customer data and digital trust against emerging quantum-enabled attacks.
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What is PQC? Threat models Status definitions Product details
What is Post-Quantum Cryptography?
Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) is a new generation of encryption and digital-signature algorithms designed to stay secure against both today's computers and future quantum computers. The public-key cryptography that protects most of the internet today could eventually be broken by a powerful enough quantum computer — PQC algorithms are built on math problems that remain hard even for quantum machines.
Standardized by NIST, including ML-KEM for key exchange and ML-DSA for digital signatures, PQC lets organizations protect sensitive data and preserve digital trust before large-scale quantum computers arrive.
Threat models
Post-quantum cryptography addresses two primary categories of quantum-enabled attacks.
Harvest Now, Decrypt Later (HNDL)
This cybersecurity threat is where malicious actors intercept and store encrypted data today, intending to decrypt it in the future once quantum computing advances enough to break current cryptographic standards. This strategy specifically targets long-term sensitive information — like government secrets, financial records, or intellectual property — that will still hold immense value years down the road.
Quantum Forgery
This threat is the risk that future quantum computers will use advanced algorithms to break current public-key cryptography and counterfeit digital signatures or certificates. This allows attackers to completely undermine digital trust by executing fraudulent transactions, falsifying identities, or authorizing malicious software updates under the guise of legitimate credentials.
Status definitions
Red Hat uses the following status categories to describe PQC readiness across its product portfolio.
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PQC-Capable Technologies that can be configured to work with PQC algorithms but require manual, per-instance intervention. |
PQC-Ready Technologies that prefer and enable PQC algorithms by default, with no action required. |
Under active development Technology is in the development stages, may depend on upstream community updates, or publication of standards to be published in a future release. |
Product details
Select a product below for detailed feature-by-feature PQC status, including threat analysis, constraints, minimum version requirements, and links to documentation.
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux Provides the foundational cryptographic libraries and security baseline inheritance that enable post-quantum cryptographic features. |
Red Hat OpenShift Leverages RHEL-based post-quantum cryptography to secure critical cloud-native traffic against quantum-era threats. |
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Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Leverages RHEL's cryptographic foundation to secure automation traffic and node communications against quantum threats. |
Red Hat Quay Leverages RHEL-based transport protection and aligns its image-signing roadmap with Sigstore to secure container registry operations against quantum threats. |
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Red Hat Certificate System Secures identity management through dual-certificate issuance, supporting both classical and post-quantum ML-DSA algorithms to maintain backward compatibility. |
