BUILDING A POST-QUANTUM CERTIFICATE AUTHORITY WITH MERKLE TREE CERTIFICATES

Summary from the TLDR DevOps newsletter

Cloudflare is launching a certificate authority that will support Merkle Tree Certificates (MTCs), targeting early 2027 for inclusion in Chrome's Quantum-resistant Root Store. The company will provide standard MTC issuance at no cost. MTCs batch certificates into an append-only Merkle tree to address the scaling issues of post-quantum cryptography, which can increase log storage requirements by 40 times. Cloudflare successfully tested the technology with Chrome, serving billions of MTCs and finding that median performance was 9% faster than classical signature chains.