2025-10-07 –, Prague/ Technical Deep Dive & Innovation
As the cryptographic community rallies behind NIST's post-quantum cryptography (PQC) standardization, one truth is becoming clear: PQC won't succeed in isolation. It must interoperate — across algorithms, libraries, protocols, and real-world infrastructure.
We have embraced this challenge head-on by creating a living interoperability tracker — continuously testing PQC integration across solutions and open-source projects like EJBCA, SignServer, and Bouncy Castle. Working in collaboration with projects such as OpenSSL, WolfSSL, and leading HSM vendors, our goal is clear: to demonstrate that post-quantum cryptography isn’t just theoretical — it’s practical and working today.
This talk will share concrete results from our testing across TLS 1.3, CMS, hybrid certificates, and Hardware Security Modules (HSM) integrations — using LMS, ML-DSA, ML-KEM, and SLH-DSA. We’ll highlight what worked, what broke, and what we’re learning about making PQC truly usable at scale.
Most importantly, we’ll explore how collaboration — with OpenSSL maintainers, IETF hackathons, and standards bodies — is critical to ensuring that the next generation of cryptography is not only secure, but interoperable and practical. We’ll provide practical configuration examples and open-source tools for those ready to start their own PQC journey.
Takeaways:
Real-world insights from PQC testing across libraries (OpenSSL, Bouncy Castle, WolfSSL)
Use case deep dives: mTLS, CMS signing, hybrid certificates, HSMs
Lessons learned about format compatibility, signature size handling, and certificate issuance
How community collaboration accelerates adoption and improves standards
How to get started testing PQC today using open-source tools
Tomas Gustavsson is the Chief PKI Officer at Keyfactor. Tomas has an MSc from KTH in Stockholm and has been researching and implementing PKI systems since 1994. He is the founder of the open-source enterprise PKI project EJBCA and still get into development from time to time, a contributor to numerous open-source projects, and a member of the board of Open Source Sweden.
As a co-founder of PrimeKey, Tomas is passionate about helping users worldwide find the best possible PKI and digital signature solutions.