Cloudflare Says Its Post-Quantum TLS Certificates Will Be Free to Everyone
Cloudflare says it will use an open source platform that issues both classic TLS certificates and a post-quantum equivalent known as Merkle Tree Certificates. The hybrid certificates will be free to both paying and non-paying users, according to the company's announcement on Tuesday.
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The flip side of a free upgrade is the size of the migration it sits on: the company frames its plans as part of a major overhaul in web public key infrastructure needed to make website encryption and authentication safe for the coming post-quantum age.
The genuinely awkward engineering problem isn't the certificate itself but the plumbing around it — quantum-proof signatures that can travel inside ordinary web requests and still be recorded in transparency logs, so that counterfeit certificates can't be assigned to websites.