More than half of the world's top 1 million websites now support post-quantum key exchange, according to research from F5 Labs, but that protection extends only to the front door. The State of PQC on the Web study warns that much of this apparent progress comes from content delivery network providers enabling protection by default, rather than organizations upgrading their own infrastructure for what 38% of chief information security officers view as a top high-impact emerging threat.
The F5 Labs study found that 54% of top websites now offer post-quantum key exchange, but when Cloudflare-hosted sites are excluded, that figure falls to just 22%. Only 27% of CISOs in a June KPMG survey reported actively implementing post-quantum cryptography. Government and telecommunications websites lagged especially far behind, with just 35% supporting post-quantum key exchange despite handling sensitive, long-lived data. More than one in 10 websites in the broader sample still lacked support for TLS 1.3, which is required for the post-quantum key exchanges F5 tested. The research examined only the website's front end, not whether enterprise application servers behind the CDN or internal traffic use post-quantum cryptography.
"54% sounds like we're halfway to a quantum-safe web, but we need to be clear about what we're measuring," says David Warburton, director of F5 Labs. The study looked at PQC key exchange support, but post-quantum certificates aren't yet available for the public internet, according to the report. Independent experts backed F5 Labs' conclusions, warning that genuine post-quantum readiness demands upgrading every layer in the technology stack. CDN-enabled post-quantum cryptography provides real protection for the client-to-edge connection, but this protection doesn't automatically extend to origin servers, internal APIs, service-to-service communications, or enterprise public key infrastructure.
Organizations face substantial obstacles in upgrading beyond the edge because of reliance on legacy technologies and other dependencies, the report explains. Companies have older clients, partner integrations, and change-control processes that make rapid upgrades difficult, and many vendors haven't yet updated their products to support post-quantum cryptography. Implementation guidance has only recently started to catch up with core standards—NIST finalized its first post-quantum cryptography standards in 2024 while the IETF published the standard defining hybrid post-quantum key exchange mechanisms for TLS 1.3 in August this year. Post-quantum adoption is moving fastest where it can be enabled centrally, but internal connections could potentially be an even bigger target for harvest now, decrypt later attacks. Government and critical infrastructure organizations face additional challenges because of more long-lived operational technology, self-hosted systems, and slower procurement cycles. Financial institutions must address complex dependencies involving hardware security modules, payment infrastructure, public key infrastructure, and third-party services, while telecommunications providers must consider large-scale network infrastructure and interoperability.
Organizations should start by conducting an inventory of their existing cryptography use, prioritizing data that must remain confidential for years, and planning upgrades to systems that will take longest to change, the report recommends. That means looking beyond public websites to internal applications, APIs, VPNs, identity systems, and embedded libraries. Enterprises should build a cryptographic bill of materials, remove legacy dependencies, enable hybrid post-quantum cryptography where possible, and automate certificate management so they can change algorithms and certificates without turning every update into a major infrastructure project. Meaningful enterprise readiness assessment should examine whether an organization understands its cryptographic dependencies, has prioritized assets according to quantum-related risk, and can replace vulnerable algorithms without major architectural disruption. Organizations with relatively mature cybersecurity governance can still face substantial implementation challenges, making planning maturity distinct from deployment maturity. The quantum advantage isn't arriving tomorrow, but enterprises that wait for turnkey solutions will find themselves racing to retrofit sprawling systems under pressure rather than designing resilience from the inside out.