Quantum-safe PKI for the German administration
Channel: PKI Consortium
Date: 07/12/2023

The BSI is in control of the root certification authority of the public administration Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). This PKI is an essential element of the German government’s business processes at federal, state and municipal levels. For instance, subscribers of this PKI receive a signed certificate corresponding to a cryptographic key pair, which is used for identification, encryption, the creation of electronic signatures and other applications.

Currently, this PKI is based on RSA-4096. Hence, its security is threatened by the potential development of cryptographically relevant quantum computers. In order to address this threat, a full migration to a PKI based on quantum-safe cryptographic primitives has to be carried out.

Due to the variety of use-cases within this PKI, a number of technical requirements concerning performance, security and interoperability have to be taken into account in this migration. The goal of the talk is to discuss these requirements in detail and to present several concepts and possible solutions. In particular, we argue that a parallelized migration approach is essential in order to ensure constant availability of the system. Moreover, we discuss why standardized, stateful hash-based signature schemes such as XMSS or LMS are promising candidates for the root-CA-level in the PKI hierarchy.

Kaveh Bashiri - The Federal Office for Information Security (BSI)