August 1, 2025 •Alex Zaslavsky
Three times each year, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) holds week-long, onsite meetings to help their Working Groups get their tasks done. Recently, IETF 123 was held in Madrid, Spain. IETF 123 started with a 2-day hackathon, where 200+ developers and subject matter experts met to collaborate and develop sample code to demonstrate practical implementations of potential IETF standards. At this hackathon, I participated in the PQC certificates team, where we were able to build and test interoperability with several pure PQC and hybrid PQC digital certificate formats.
At IETF 123 and the hackathon, one message rang loud and clear - building and maintaining digital trust in a post-quantum world is a community effort. Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) certificates are a crucial step forward in securing our digital infrastructure against future quantum threats. But ensuring their success isn’t the job of one vendor or even one sector - it takes a village.
Hardware Security Module (HSM) vendors are laying the foundation by securing the most sensitive cryptographic assets — the Root CA keys - using hardware-based protections. Certificate lifecycle and workflow management providers are enabling enterprises to deploy and manage PQC certificates efficiently across diverse environments. Browser developers are stepping up to provide support for PQC in trust chains, and cryptographic library maintainers are implementing, optimizing, and validating these next-generation algorithms. Each piece of the puzzle is essential to a trustworthy and interoperable future.
The IETF has long served as the backbone of internet standardization, and it continues to shine as a hub for collaboration. At IETF 123, we saw firsthand how effective this community can be - reviewing the latest drafts, debating proposed standards, and working hands-on with interoperability testing of PQC certificates. It’s a proving ground and an incubator, bringing experts from across the ecosystem together to make progress - not just in theory, but in practice.
The PQC Certificate project I participated in was led by John Gray from Entrust. One of the group’s goals was to test interoperability between different vendors supporting pure PQC digital signatures. The other goal was to promote IETF standards for hybrid PQC signatures and ensure their adoption. In this hackathon, I was able to add SafeLogic as a vendor supporting pure PQC digital signatures, generate our version of signatures, test that our software could validate other vendors’ signatures, and upload our results to a common repository.
While IETF meeting attendees attend as individual volunteers as opposed to employees of organizations, one can get a good idea of the companies represented in my project by looking at the interoperability results on GitHub. Some companies in this project included Entrust, DigiCert, OpenSSL, Bouncy Castle, Crypto4A, PQShield, and, of course, SafeLogic.
Founded in 1986, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is the preeminent standards development body for the Internet. It helps shape the development and growth of the Internet by creating and publishing voluntary standards that Internet users, networking companies, and equipment manufacturers often adopt.
An open organization, there is no membership in the IETF. Instead, anyone can participate by signing up for a working group mailing list or registering for an IETF meeting. According to the IETF, over 7,000 people actively participate in their community each year.
SafeLogic is proud to be part of this vibrant and essential community. We're committed to contributing our expertise, collaborating with peers, and supporting our partners as we transition to a more secure, quantum-resistant digital future.
Because when it comes to digital trust, especially in the post-quantum era, it truly takes a village.
