Post-quantum: US GAO and Europol urge faster migration

Two institutions warned in the same week that preparation for the quantum threat is falling behind. On October 6, 2026, the GAO (Government Accountability Office, the audit body of the US Congress) published a report on the readiness of federal agencies. On October 7, Europol released two reports, one on the "harvest now, decrypt later" strategy, the other on cryptocurrencies.

GAO: no agency is ready

The GAO assessed 24 large federal agencies against three practices drawn from White House guidance: drawing up a prioritized inventory of vulnerable cryptography, estimating the cost of migration, and testing post-quantum algorithms. The result: none of the 24 has fully implemented all three practices. According to The Quantum Insider, only one agency had fully completed the steps needed for a prioritized inventory of vulnerable systems.

The GAO attributes these gaps to three shortfalls: cryptography expertise, processes for building inventories and identifying budgets, and plans to guide testing. It should be noted, however, that this document is the public version of a sensitive report delivered to the agencies in September 2025. That report made 89 recommendations to 23 agencies, and the situation may have changed since. The GAO notes that most experts consider it likely that a quantum computer capable of breaking some current algorithms will arrive, possibly as early as the 2030s, with widely varying estimates.

Europol: the danger of data being collected today

Europol's first report, written with Carlos III University of Madrid, covers the "harvest now, decrypt later" scenario. An attacker records encrypted communications today in order to decrypt them once they have a sufficiently powerful quantum computer. TLS, SSH and files encrypted with OpenPGP are affected. The level of exposure depends on configuration and key management.

The second report, on cryptocurrencies, concludes that they will not collapse because of quantum computing. The weak point would be wallets rather than blockchains: a private key could be computed from a public key that is already visible. Europol recommends a gradual transition to resistant wallets.

What to do right now

According to Infosecurity Magazine, Europol recommends that organizations take the following measures:

• move to TLS 1.3 and SSH2, and disable older protocols;
• enforce forward secrecy (forward secrecy), which prevents a stolen key from decrypting past communications;
• delete sensitive data that is no longer needed: what is not kept cannot be decrypted later;
• consider adopting post-quantum cryptography, including in hybrid mode.

On the tooling side, post-quantum hybrid key exchange has been enabled by default in OpenSSH since version 9.0, and it has used ML-KEM since version 10.0. The GAO's finding also applies to European companies: without an inventory of the cryptography in use, it is impossible to plan the migration.