Cloudflare to become a CA, post-quantum certs in 2027
Cloudflare is setting itself up as a public certificate authority (CA) and plans to issue post-quantum website certificates, known as Merkle Tree Certificates (MTCs), in production in the first quarter of 2027.
A CA issues the digital certificates that websites use to encrypt traffic and prove their identity to visitors. Cloudflare's new CA will offer both conventional certificates and MTCs.
The company gave two reasons for the move. First, it says most certificate issuance on the web depends on a small group of dominant CAs, so a failure or compromise at one of them could have wide effects. Second, it expects quantum computers capable of breaking today's encryption to arrive within years. A new high-scale issuer addresses the first problem. MTCs address the second.