Cloudflare announced it will provide post-quantum cryptography for free by default to all customers to help secure their websites, APIs, cloud tools and remote employees against future threats. Now, all Cloudflare customers will be able to seamlessly migrate to the next era of cybersecurity standards–instantly and for free.
Cloudflare is making this commitment at the 2023 Summit for Democracy in support of a more responsive and resilient Internet, and will additionally publish vendor-neutral roadmaps based on NIST standards to help businesses secure any connections that are not protected by Cloudflare.
Already powering more than 99% of all websites that support NIST standard track post-quantum cryptography, Cloudflare aims to help defend online users against threats of advanced computing.
Quantum computers–which perform complex computations at an exponentially faster rate than today’s machines–are expected to become advanced enough in the coming years to decrypt much of the encrypted data on the Internet. The Biden Administration recently mandated government agencies, and is encouraging the private sector, to prepare for quantum computers that could break encryption in the future of data stolen today.
CISOs and CIOs know they need to prepare to migrate to post-quantum cryptography before this happens. Unfortunately, emerging vendors want to capitalise on this to charge unnecessarily high fees–limiting the access and affordability for businesses, as well as non-profits and civil society organisations. There are companies out there that want to charge CISOs exorbitant amounts to prepare for future attacks from quantum computers.
“At Cloudflare, we believe that privacy should be a human right and that post-quantum security should be the new baseline for the Internet–not an exploitative expense for businesses. That is why we are promising today to help equip businesses as well as non-profits and users with the most advanced cryptography available and to never charge for it,” said Matthew Prince, Co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare.”
Cloudflare has helped lead the development of post-quantum cryptography standards since 2018, and made post-quantum cryptography available as a beta to interested customers in 2022. Cloudflare believes that over 99% of websites on the Internet that already support NIST-approved post-quantum cryptography for their connections are powered by Cloudflare, and over 1 billion HTTP requests have been protected with post-quantum cryptography by Cloudflare since 2019.
