Cloudflare plans to begin issuing quantum-resistant TLS certificates that combine today’s classical certificates with Merkle Tree-based post-quantum equivalents, offering hybrid certificates free to paying and non-paying customers. To accelerate deployment and achieve broad trust, Cloudflare is acquiring a trusted root from GlobalSign so millions of sites can flip on post-quantum certs without extra performance cost. The company will publish milestones publicly and work with browser, OS, and root-program engineers across the WebPKI ecosystem; actual issuance is expected to start in the first quarter of 2027, but full adoption requires years of coordinated architectural work.
The technical rationale is that simply switching X.509 signatures to quantum-safe algorithms would balloon TLS handshakes roughly 40× and break current systems. Google and Cloudflare’s Merkle Tree design compresses proof data to roughly 40 KB by having certificate authorities sign a single tree head that represents millions of certs and delivering lightweight “landmarks” to clients. That approach replaces long, quantum-vulnerable signature chains with compact Merkle proofs, couples issuance and transparency logging so logging is required rather than optional, and preserves existing handshake performance. The plan also includes ACME automation and out-of-band delivery options (for example, via browser updates) to handle server or update failures and to blunt risks from quantum attacks like those enabled by Shor’s algorithm.
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