Cloudflare to Issue Quantum-Safe TLS Certificates
Original: Cloudflare plans to issue quantum-safe TLS certificates
Why This Matters
Post-quantum TLS at web scale requires infrastructure-level changes that only a handful of players can drive.
Cloudflare announced Tuesday it will issue post-quantum TLS certificates using Merkle Tree Certificates, an open-source format developed with Google. The company will acquire a trusted certificate root from GlobalSign to accelerate adoption. Certificates will be free to all users, with no added performance overhead.
Cloudflare has committed to issuing quantum-resistant TLS certificates as part of a broad overhaul of the web public key infrastructure (WebPKI). The plan centers on Merkle Tree Certificates, a format co-developed with Google that replaces conventional X.509 certificate chains — which would balloon TLS handshake data by roughly 40x under post-quantum cryptography — with compact Merkle Tree proofs that keep handshake size around 40 kilobytes, on par with today's standard.
To gain the trusted root status required for browsers and operating systems to recognize its certificates, Cloudflare is acquiring an existing trusted root from CA GlobalSign. Steve Goldsmith of Cloudflare was direct about the timeline: 'We are not issuing certificates yet, and it will be a little while before we do.' The company framed the announcement as a public commitment rather than a product launch, promising to share milestones as they arrive.
Both paying and free-tier users will receive the hybrid certificates — which cover both classical and post-quantum authentication — at no cost. The shift matters because current WebPKI relies on signature chains that quantum computers could break, and simply swapping in quantum-resistant algorithms would be far too bandwidth-intensive to be practical at scale.