Post-quantum cryptography standard support

Post-quantum cryptography is being pushed by over 25 global countries. In addition, non-government agencies like the financial industry are starting to draft their own requirements. These requirements want post-quantum cryptography support by 2030. However, many organizations have already declared the desire to be post-quantum ready by 2029.

A few important points regarding the regulations:

- Different countries want support for different algorithms and many algorithms are still being developed. For instance, the US is actively adding more PQC algorithms to the NIST list. Therefore, we need to design our requirements for adding more algorithms in the future.
- The PQC requirements also include the deprecation of algorithms and configurations. For instance, SHA-1 becomes disallowed. In addition, traditional public key algorithms with key sizes less than 4096 become deprecated. SHA2-224/SHA3-224 becomes disallowed. ENISA (European Union technology governance), doesn't require, but is pushing SHA2-512/SHA3-512 as the standard.

As a standards organization, we can maintain backwards compatibility with pre-PQC requirements. However, we need to ensure that the standards supports the new algorithms, higher key sizes, and is flexible for continually adding more algorithms over time as new algorithms are being rolled out.

We also need to have error handling for situations where the creating entity is using cryptography implementations that the verifying entity doesn't know how to process. Due to the continuous roll out of the algorithms over time, we need to expect that there will be mismatches between implementations.