Skip to content

SYSTEM Cited by 1 source

CIRCL (Cloudflare Interoperable Reusable Cryptographic Library)

What

CIRCL (github.com/cloudflare/circl) is Cloudflare's open-source Go cryptography library providing implementations of post-quantum and advanced cryptographic algorithms that Go's standard library does not yet support.

Role in PQ authentication

When Cloudflare's SSL/TLS control-plane service (written in Go) needed to parse and validate ML-DSA certificates for the Authenticated Origin Pulls and Custom Origin Trust Store products, Go's standard crypto/x509 and crypto/tls libraries did not yet support ML-DSA. Cloudflare implemented the necessary functionality in CIRCL to patch in support — ML-DSA X.509 certificate parsing and validation.

Planned deprecation (Go 1.27)

Go 1.27 (expected August 2026) will include native ML-DSA support in the standard library, allowing Cloudflare to drop the CIRCL dependency for ML-DSA cert handling. The post notes this is a "relatively simple change" for one service, but "repeating this for every service that needs post-quantum authentication support would be a major chore" — hence the value of waiting for stdlib support for broader rollout.

(Source: sources/2026-07-29-cloudflare-post-quantum-authentication-to-origins)

Seen in

Last updated · 602 distilled / 1,824 read