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Cloudflare Develops Public Certificate Authority for Post-Quantum Web Security
The approach batches certificate data into an append-only Merkle tree, letting clients verify certificates with compact inclusion proofs instead of transmitting a full certificate chain.
Cloudflare attributed most of the measured improvement to eliminating intermediate certificates; the experiment used classical signatures rather than post-quantum signatures. Building on the approach covered in InfoQ's earlier report, Cloudflare describes how landmark-based verification and independent transparency log cosigners support certificate issuance and verification at scale.
The experiment served billions of MTCs to 50% of Chrome Beta 146 for selected domains on Cloudflare's free plan. Cloudflare wound down the experiment in August 2026 and is developing a public certificate authority (CA) that supports MTC issuance, targeting inclusion in Chrome's quantum-resistant Root Store in early 2027, subject to evaluation.
