NIST FIPS 203 standardised post-quantum key encapsulation in 2024. CNSA 2.0 mandates post-quantum cryptography for US national-security systems by 2030. EU regulation (NIS2, CER, the emerging Cyber Resilience Act) is following. Industrial sensors, satellites, drones, and connected vehicles deployed today routinely have 15-to-25-year operational lifetimes — well past the realistic horizon for a cryptographically relevant quantum computer.
EdSSA Nano was post-quantum from the first design draft. The bootstrap handshake uses ML-KEM-768, the post-quantum key encapsulation NIST standardised as FIPS 203, so recording a handshake today in order to open it with a quantum computer later — the harvest-now, decrypt-later attack — is designed out from the first day. After the bootstrap the protocol runs on a symmetric core. The bootstrap material is discarded immediately and the shared state moves only forward, through one-way functions, so a device captured later cannot be made to reproduce the credentials it produced before it was captured.
This is structurally different from a vault-based system bolting post-quantum primitives onto a centralised authority that still has to be reachable per-request. Structural Authentication removes the round-trip altogether — there is no per-request quantum-vulnerable conversation to intercept, because there is no per-request conversation.
Post-quantum is not an upgrade we offer. It’s the architecture.