Defense (gov & military)

BSI-aligned hardware and sovereign keying material

Defense and government operations cannot delegate cryptographic trust to commercial cloud providers. Quanten Security deploys ML-KEM-1024 and ML-DSA-87 through HSM-backed profiles aligned to BSI evaluation expectations, with all key generation and storage occurring on-premises under the client’s physical control. Private key bytes never traverse a network boundary in plaintext form. Key ceremony procedures follow BSI TR-02102 and NIST SP 800-57 Part 1, providing a documented chain of custody from initial key generation through scheduled rotation and eventual retirement.

For environments requiring air-gap separation between key management and operational networks, Quanten’s out-of-band provisioning workflow transfers key material via HSM-to-HSM authenticated export, eliminating any software path that a network-resident adversary could intercept. Entropy planning can use quantum random number generator (QRNG) options mapped to BSI AIS 20/31 Class PTG.3, subject to exact device evidence and deployment review.

NATO crypto-agility and SCIF deployment

Allied interoperability requirements impose additional constraints on algorithm selection and key distribution. Quanten’s crypto-agility engine expresses algorithm preferences as versioned policy profiles, allowing NATO-aligned deployments to enforce approved algorithm sets across heterogeneous equipment from multiple vendors. When a new profile is published — for instance, after a NATO CSAC review cycle — it is pushed to all enrolled nodes without service interruption, with the previous profile remaining active on in-flight sessions until they terminate cleanly.

Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) deployments introduce additional physical and logical constraints. Quanten’s SCIF configuration removes all external management interfaces from the key management cluster after initial provisioning. Day-to-day operations — key rotation, audit log export, certificate renewal — are performed via a dedicated administrative workstation on the classified enclave, with no path from the management plane to the internet.

• ML-KEM-1024 and ML-DSA-87 on BSI-aligned HSM deployment profiles
• QRNG entropy options mapped to BSI AIS 20/31 Class PTG.3
• Air-gapped key provisioning via HSM-to-HSM export
• NATO crypto-agility policy profiles with hot-swap
• SCIF deployment planning for management isolation

Engagement deliverables

• Classification-boundary map showing channels whose confidentiality lifetime exceeds the migration window.
• Sovereign key-management runbook for ceremony control, rotation, escrow, and audit-log export.
• Crypto-agility profile set for approved, transitional, and retired algorithm combinations.

Addressing harvest-now-decrypt-later at the classification boundary

Classified information with multi-decade retention requirements is the primary target of harvest-now-decrypt-later collection campaigns. Intelligence services operating at nation-state scale are storing encrypted traffic today with the explicit intent of decrypting it once a cryptographically relevant quantum computer becomes available. A 2029–2033 planning scenario is uncomfortably close when set against a typical migration programme running 24–36 months.

Quanten’s engagement model for defense clients begins with a classification-aware data flow analysis: identifying which channels carry data whose confidentiality requirement exceeds the projected CRQC arrival date. Those channels are prioritised for immediate PQC migration, regardless of their current encryption strength in the classical model. Talk to our security team to initiate a classification boundary assessment.