2026-06-2313 min readOn June 22, 2026, President Trump signed Executive Order 14409, "Securing the Nation Against Advanced Cryptographic Attacks." The order sets a December 31, 2030, deadline for federal agencies to transition their most sensitive systems to post-quantum encryption, and a December 31, 2031, deadline for post-quantum authentication. The EO also directs federal contractors to comply with post-quantum Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) by the end of 2030.We welcome this executive order. The U.S. government has a long track record of using federal leadership and procurement to drive adoption of new technologies across the broader industry. We've seen this work with IPv6, with routing security and the Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI), and with DNSSEC, and we’re glad to see this tradition continue with post-quantum cryptography.The EO is especially important at this moment because the timeline for Q-Day, the day that quantum computers can break the public-key cryptography used across the Internet, has been accelerated. In April 2026, Cloudflare moved our own target for full post-quantum security to 2029, following research breakthroughs from Google and Oratomic. This EO updates guidance from 2024, when the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) stated that the classical public key cryptography used across the Internet (namely RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography, which can be broken once powerful quantum computers become available) should be deprecated by 2030 and disallowed by 2035. The Internet’s transition to post-quantum encryption is well underway, while the transition to post-quantum authentication has only just begun. Today, over two-thirds of browser traffic to Cloudflare's network is protected with post-quantum encryption, and most of our products support post-quantum key agreement. Our SASE platform, Cloudflare One, provides post-quantum encryption across all major on-ramps and off-ramps, including TLS, MASQUE, and IPsec. We've recently started deploying post-quantum authentication and aim to be fully post-quantum secure by 2029. The EO is an excellent foundation and builds on work from the previous two Administrations. We've been doing the work the EO is asking federal agencies to do since 2019, we have some thoughts on what the order gets right, we see opportunities for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to strengthen and facilitate cost-effective agency migration, and we provide a roadmap for how organizations and agencies can advance their transition most effectively.