Cloudflare Advances Industry’s First Cloud-Native Quantum-Safe Zero Trust Solution
Cloudflare, Inc., the leading connectivity cloud company, announced that it is expanding end-to-end support for post-quantum cryptography to its Zero Trust Network Access solution. Available immediately, organizations can securely route communications from web browsers to corporate web applications to gain immediate, end-to-end quantum-safe connectivity. By mid-2025, Cloudflare will extend this support to include all IP protocols, significantly broadening compatibility across most corporate applications and devices. With this, organizations will be able to rely on Cloudflare to transition their Internet communications between users, devices and applications to post-quantum cryptography without the complexity of individually upgrading each corporate application or system.
Today encryption is used to keep online data protected—everything
from personal messages, to financial information, to customer data—and anything
that people and organizations would want to keep safe from hackers. As quantum
computers move closer to production, that data is at risk of being unlocked,
breaking current encryption methods and potentially exposing data that was once
secured. Conventional cryptographic algorithms used across the Internet
securing everything from major financial organizations and healthcare providers
to government agencies and consumer smart devices, are vulnerable to
post-quantum attacks.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) even
made a landmark announcement to phase out conventional cryptographic algorithms
and to adopt post-quantum cryptography by 2030, as experts now estimate
significant risks could emerge in as little as five years. There is an urgent
need to adopt post-quantum cryptography, and Cloudflare has led the industry by
contributing to the creation of industry standards and making post-quantum security
free, by default, for all of its customers.
“Cloudflare has long committed to making post-quantum security
the new baseline for Internet security, delivering it to all customers so we
can bolster defenses against future quantum threats. Now, we’re offering that
protection built directly into our Zero Trust solutions,” said Matthew Prince,
co-founder and CEO at Cloudflare. “We want every Cloudflare customer to have a
clear path to quantum safety, and we are already working with some of the most
innovative banks, ISPs, and governments around the world as they begin their
journeys to quantum security. We will continue to make advanced cryptography
accessible to everyone, at no cost, in all of our products.”
Since 2017, Cloudflare has been at the forefront of researching,
developing, and standardizing post-quantum cryptography. Today, over 35 percent
of the human-generated traffic connecting to Cloudflare's global network
benefits from post-quantum protection. Even in a future where quantum computing
could compromise conventional cryptography, Cloudflare's quantum-safe Zero
Trust Network Access (ZTNA) solutions are designed to protect data as it
travels over the public Internet. With this announcement, Cloudflare’s Zero
Trust Platform will enable organizations to:
Protect against “harvest-now decrypt later” attacks:
Cybercriminals can capture encrypted data today, and store it until they can
decrypt it when better quantum computers are available. Starting today,
customers can direct their web traffic through Cloudflare’s global network, to
protect against these future attacks by using post-quantum cryptography.
Enable corporate web applications with end-to-end quantum
security: Now organizations can grant employees access to corporate web
applications—like HR systems, payroll and collaboration systems–without needing
to upgrade the security of every single corporate web application individually.
Cloudflare Access now can secure the Internet traffic from web browsers to
corporate web applications from quantum threats.
Deliver quantum safety for Internet traffic traveling to any
corporate office, cloud environment or datacenter: By mid-2025, organizations
will be benefit from end-to-end quantum safety for any protocol connected
through Cloudflare’s most popular network configurations by installing
Cloudflare’s WARP device client on their end users devices.
“The world has five years to replace vulnerable cryptography
with post-quantum solutions,” said Tom Patterson, emerging technology security
lead at Accenture. “To meet this urgent client need, Accenture and Cloudflare
offer a hybrid approach, enabling an iterative, low-risk migration while
maintaining compatibility and cryptographic agility.”
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