Confidentiality vs Authentication: How Far the Web Has Actually Moved

Episode notes

As post-quantum cryptography moves from theory into deployment, organizations need a clearer view of what is real today and what still requires time. In this episode of Shielded: The Last Line of Cyber Defense, Sofia Celi, Senior Cryptography and Security Researcher at Brave, breaks down the two-speed reality shaping PQC adoption. She explains why confidentiality is already protected at scale through TLS 1.3 and hybrid post-quantum key encapsulation, now used across major browsers, CDNs, and cloud providers to defend against harvest-now-decrypt-later threats. This shift is live, scaled, and part of today’s internet. However, authentication like signatures, PKI, eID systems, and privacy-preserving proofs remains early. Lattice-based signatures are large and costly, prompting NIST’s second call for signature schemes with new mathematical foundations and smaller communication sizes. Sofia’s work on MAYO, a compact multivariate signature scheme, offers a promising path for authentication, distributed signing, and environments where signature size matters. She also examines European digital identity plans, noting the gap between policy ambition and cryptographic readiness.