Post-quantum cryptography readiness

PATENT PENDING — Ma'atara Protocol. Reviewed 21 September 2026. Non-normative research overview; not a fallback or algorithm-negotiation policy.

Standards and current choices

The three standards were finalized in 2024. A KEM establishes key material; it is not itself bulk-content encryption. Ma'atara uses AES-256-GCM for native content encryption and SHA3-384 for native digests. These algorithm choices do not certify the implementation or product.

Consult the standards' errata as well as the original publications. NIST's FIPS 203 and FIPS 204 pages both carry update/errata notices. Avoid treating a fixed document date as proof that all implementation guidance is unchanged.

Readiness means reviewed changes

Inventory algorithms and dependencies, test releases against their declared profiles, monitor standards updates, and plan explicit versioned upgrades. Do not silently negotiate weaker algorithms, reinterpret existing signatures, or substitute primitives inside a standards profile while claiming wire compatibility.

The published toolkit has separate experimental pairwise and hybrid channel entry points. Production messaging profiles remain disabled; their presence is not an independent-audit result, production activation or general interoperability claim.

Additional algorithms under NIST evaluation are research and migration-planning inputs. They are not automatically supported by Ma'atara or approved fallbacks for its native records. See the NIST PQC project for current standardization status.

What reviewers should ask for

Assess actual package versions, real-runtime tests, current authority and recovery behavior, implementation review and deployment receipts separately. An algorithm label does not establish endpoint security, hardware custody, forward secrecy or rollback protection.

Public SDK guidance covers integration. Internal derivation, message construction and novel protocol recipes are outside this research overview.