Skip to content

CONCEPT Cited by 1 source

PQC Migration Levels

Definition

PQC Migration Levels is a five-rung maturity ladder proposed by Meta's Security team in 2026-04 for organisations managing post-quantum cryptography migration across many use cases with heterogeneous readiness. The levels are ordered by time to react to a relevant quantum event — the shorter, the better. A "relevant quantum event" can be advances in quantum computing, publication of new PQ standards, or establishment of new industry practices.

The five levels, from lowest to highest readiness:

Level Definition Time-to-react
PQ-Unaware Organisation is not aware of the quantum threat to a use case. Indefinite — discovery itself is the bottleneck.
PQ-Aware Organisation knows the threat applies and has done an initial assessment of what reaching PQ readiness would take, but has not started designing protections. Bounded by scoping work — but the engineering hasn't begun.
PQ-Ready A post-quantum-secure solution suitable for the use case has been implemented but not enabled. Cost, prioritisation, or other factors prevent deployment. Short — flip a switch once constraints clear.
PQ-Hardened All currently-available post-quantum protections are deployed; the full quantum threat cannot yet be mitigated because some PQ primitives don't exist in the literature (e.g. efficient PQ-OPRFs). Minimised given current state of the art.
PQ-Enabled The ultimate goal — a fully PQ-secure solution is deployed and serving the use case. Event handled; no further reaction required.

"PQ-Enabled is the platinum standard that organizations should aim for each one of its applications and use cases. However, any organization looking to increase its resilience to quantum threats can take steps on its way to PQ-Enabled."

(Source: sources/2026-04-16-meta-post-quantum-cryptography-migration-at-meta-framework-lesson)

Why a ladder, not a binary

The canonical alternative — "migrated" / "not migrated" — is too coarse to plan against:

  • The transition is multi-year with dependencies in different states (standards / HSMs / implementations / TLS-stack).
  • Not every use case can reach PQ-Enabled simultaneously — budgets, hardware refresh cycles, and dependencies vary.
  • Organisations that cannot commit to full enablement this budget cycle need meaningful intermediate goals to commit to.

The ladder provides reachable intermediate milestones that each reduce time-to-react even without full enablement:

Even starting the migration process by setting the level of minimally acceptable success at PQ-Ready may have benefits. At this level companies that may not have budgeted for near-term enablement can feel motivated (and rewarded) for building the necessary building blocks to complete risk mitigation in the future. (Source: this post)

PQ-Ready is explicitly acknowledged as "not a desirable end goal given the fact it is not yet protecting the use case against quantum attacks, but it does reduce the time to react when compared to lower levels." — an honest characterisation of a middle step.

PQ-Hardened vs PQ-Enabled — the literature gap

The distinction between these top two levels is subtle but load-bearing. PQ-Hardened means "we've done everything the state of the art allows", while PQ-Enabled means "we've deployed a solution that fully addresses the quantum threat for this use case."

Some use cases structurally cannot reach PQ-Enabled today because the required primitives don't yet exist:

For instance, efficient post-quantum Oblivious Pseudorandom Functions (OPRFs) are not yet available and therefore use cases relying on this type of primitive could only achieve PQ-Hardened level. (Source: this post)

For such use cases, PQ-Hardened is the current end of the ladder; PQ-Enabled waits for the cryptography community to publish new primitives. This is the Migration Levels framework's way of saying "we're not stuck because the primitives don't exist — we have a coherent goal to aim for, and the ladder advances when the literature advances."

How to use the levels

  • Per-use-case, not per-organisation. Different services have different readiness; the same organisation may have PQ-Enabled Web TLS and PQ-Unaware legacy internal APIs simultaneously.
  • Portfolio view. Organisations benefit from seeing which use cases are at which level, driving prioritisation work (concepts/pqc-prioritization-framework complements this ladder by saying which use cases to climb first).
  • Budget-committable. Moving one use case from PQ-Unaware to PQ-Aware is a scoped piece of work with a clear deliverable (the initial assessment). Same for each rung.
  • Coupled with crypto-inventory. PQ-Aware assessment depends on inventory data — you can't assess what you can't see.

Seen in

  • sources/2026-04-16-meta-post-quantum-cryptography-migration-at-meta-framework-lesson — canonical introduction of the five-rung ladder. Meta proposes the framework as transferable practical guidance to help "other organizations strengthen their resilience" as they plan PQC migration. Identifies PQ-Unaware as the most undesirable position and acknowledges PQ-Ready as a valuable intermediate even when full enablement is deferred.
Last updated · 319 distilled / 1,201 read