NIST's Final IR 8547 of 27 October 2026 Deprecates P-256, RSA-3072 and Ed25519 After 2030, Where the 2024 Draft Left 128-Bit Keys Untouched Until 2035
What NIST changed in the final IR 8547 on 27 October 2026
NIST published the final version of NIST IR 8547, Transition to Post-Quantum Cryptography Standards, on 27 October 2026, replacing the initial public draft of 12 November 2024. The central change sits in the transition tables. The draft deprecated only quantum-vulnerable algorithms at 112 bits of security after 2030 and let stronger keys run until they were disallowed after 2035. The final deprecates every quantum-vulnerable public-key algorithm at 112 bits or more after 2030, so ECDSA on P-256, RSA-3072 and Ed25519 now enter the deprecated category at the same point as RSA-2048. Disallowance after 2035 stays where it was.
How the final ties NIST standards to EO 14412 and OMB M-26-15
The report now cites Executive Order 14412 of 22 June 2026 and OMB Memorandum M-26-15 of 24 June 2026. Under them, federal high value assets and high impact systems must use post-quantum key establishment by 31 December 2030 and post-quantum signatures by 31 December 2031, and agencies must support TLS 1.3 by 2 January 2030. NIST says the 2030 to 2035 window exists for lower-risk and legacy systems and does not relax those deadlines. The final also names ML-KEM-768 as the default parameter set, confirms HQC as the second key-establishment scheme and states that an approved composite, or hybrid, key-establishment technique can be FIPS 140 validated when at least one of its inputs comes from an approved scheme.
The Post-Quantum Web Arrived as a Platform Setting
Nearly half, one default
A new longitudinal study tested more than two billion TLS handshakes across one million domains from 11 global vantage points. By March 2026, 49.22 percent of its stable panel negotiated a hybrid post-quantum key exchange by default. Every one of those default negotiations selected the same construction, X25519MLKEM768. The web appears to be moving quickly, but the route is narrower than the policy calendars suggest.
The platforms moved first
The paper attributes 93.92 percent of observed post-quantum TLS deployment to configurations likely managed by infrastructure providers. Cloudflare and Fastly alone account for nearly 70 percent. Owner-managed services, including many government domains, remain mostly classical. This changes how migration progress should be read: a high aggregate percentage may describe one upstream platform decision repeated across thousands of customers, while slower institutions still face their own software, procurement and legacy-system work.
A safer handshake can keep old baggage
The hybrid exchange added a predictable number of bytes but no meaningful median latency in the measured public-web setting. At the same time, provider-managed post-quantum domains often retained older protocol versions and deprecated cipher support. The result connects engineering, policy and market power. Cryptographic infrastructure concentration can accelerate protection at remarkable speed, yet it can also obscure who made the change, which services inherited it and how much of the harder migration remains unfinished.