Post-Quantum Readiness for Long-Lived IoT Devices Begins at Design Freeze

By Thomas Joos, freelance technology journalist and author.

Manufacturers finishing an IoT device today decide, through flash memory and bootloader design, whether it will still receive secure updates after 2030. NIST and EU deadlines, larger signatures, and chip suppliers' commitments must therefore be considered before design freeze.

Once a hardware design is frozen, flash size, boot code, and key storage are fixed for the entire product line. Today, manufacturers protect firmware updates and network connections with RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography. A cryptographically relevant quantum computer, meaning a machine that can solve the mathematical problems behind both schemes, would break that protection.

Forged Updates Put Devices in the Field at Risk

For manufacturers of long-lived devices, firmware signatures pose a more immediate concern than traffic that attackers might record today and decrypt later. A device that verifies its firmware with ECDSA, the elliptic-curve signature algorithm, trusts that algorithm until its trust anchor is replaced. The trust anchor is the public key in boot ROM or protected flash against which the device checks every signature. If that key cannot be changed, the device will accept a forged update from the day ECDSA is broken.