Top Highlights
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Complex Migration Ahead: Organizations face a challenging journey to adopt post-quantum cryptography (PQC), requiring substantial upgrades and validations across numerous systems, particularly in regulated industries.
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Hybrid Cloud Vulnerability: Financial, healthcare, and government sectors must address vulnerabilities in TLS communications within hybrid cloud setups by ensuring both ends support quantum-resistant algorithms.
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OpenSSL as a Solution: Upgrading to OpenSSL 3.5 allows organizations to adopt quantum-safe TLS without extensive application rewrites or architectural changes, though cloud vendor support varies.
- Immediate Action Recommended: Organizations can enhance data security against quantum threats this year through TLS hardening, while taking proactive steps ensures preparedness for rapid regulatory changes and shrinking timelines.
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The journey to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is shaping up to be long, complex, and resource-intensive. Organizations must inventory cryptographic assets, upgrade protocols, replace libraries, and validate integrations — often across thousands of systems. For many enterprises, especially those operating in regulated industries, this migration will take years.
One area where financial services, healthcare, and government organizations can get started is in hybrid cloud architectures. These environments typically rely on Transport Layer Security protocol (TLS) for communication between cloud and on-premises systems — and it’s precisely this channel that is vulnerable to quantum-era threats. To make TLS quantum-resistant, both sides of the communication channel need to support new post-quantum algorithms.
For organizations that use OpenSSL for their on-premise systems’ TLS implementations, the fact that OpenSSL 3.5 introduced PQC support into TLS key exchanges means they are just one upgrade away from quantum-safe TLS — no need to rewrite applications or change architectures.
A slight caveat: Some cloud vendors (such as Cloudflare) already provide post-quantum TLS functionality, while others have it on their roadmap. This means, depending on the cloud provider, some organizations may need to deploy a PQ TLS proxy on the cloud side themselves to achieve end-to-end quantum-safe encryption.
Practical Steps for Hardening TLS Now
Identify on-premise workloads that transmit sensitive data to cloud services — web servers, databases, backup agents, internal APIs, file shares, etc.
Talk to your cloud vendor, understand if they can support PQ algorithms on their side, or at least allow PQ TLS proxy.
Determine whether on-premise workloads use (or can use) OpenSSL for TLS. For example most modern web servers (Nginx, Apache) rely on OpenSSL for TLS encryption. See the table below for a handy guide.
Upgrade OpenSSL to version 3.5+, which includes support for PQC hybrid key exchanges.
Verify the runtime linkage to ensure the correct OpenSSL library is loaded. For example:
ldd $(which mysqld) | grep ssl
Use network inspection tools like Wireshark to analyze TLS handshakes and validate the use of PQC algorithms. Look at the supported_groups and key_share extensions for PQ identifiers (such as x25519mlkem768).
While full cryptographic inventory and migration efforts may take years, protecting data in-transit can be achieved even this year — and with minimal disruption. TLS hardening is a low-hanging fruit that can significantly reduce exposure to future quantum decryption threats.
As post-quantum timelines compress and regulations tighten, taking proactive steps now, especially where vendor and library support already exists, can give organizations a secure head start.
Common On-Prem Workloads Supporting OpenSSL3.5 for TLS
The table below lists common workloads (backend services) typically found in on-premises systems that rely on OpenSSL for TLS encryption.
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