Vietnam's Government Cipher Committee Publishes Three Draft Post-Quantum Cryptography Standards on 17 October 2026: Home-Grown HB-PQSign Beside ML-KEM and ML-DSA, on a 2027 to 2035 Roadmap
Quentir Defense Monitor
Evidence-based insights for quantum defense and security. Published by Quentir Systems LLC · October 18, 2026.
On the morning of October 17, 2026, in Hanoi, the Government Cipher Committee of Vietnam (Ban Cơ yếu Chính phủ) held a workshop to publish three draft national standards on post-quantum cryptography and to open them for comment. The committee's own account of the workshop lists the three drafts: a hash-based digital signature algorithm called HB-PQSign, in a revised version, which Vietnam researched and developed itself; a key encapsulation mechanism, ML-KEM, written against the international reference ISO/IEC 18033-2:2006/Amd.2:2026; and a lattice-based digital signature, ML-DSA, written against the US standard FIPS 204. Major General Hồ Văn Hương, deputy head of the committee, opened the session, and Dr. Nguyễn Quốc Toàn, director of its Institute of Cryptographic Science and Technology, presented the drafts.
Two things make this worth a defense reader's time. The Government Cipher Committee designs and runs the cryptography protecting Vietnam's state, party and military communications, and it sits under the Ministry of National Defense with general officers at its head, so its draft standards address the country's most sensitive networks first. And the package is a deliberate hedge: two drafts adopt the module-lattice algorithms the rest of the world has converged on, and the third puts a domestic design beside them on a different mathematical foundation, with consequences for anyone who sells cryptographic equipment into Vietnam.
What the Government Cipher Committee published on 17 October 2026: HB-PQSign, ML-KEM and ML-DSA as draft TCVN standards
The Government portal's report of the workshop adds the policy trail behind the drafts. The committee cites Politburo Resolution 56-NQ/TW of March 5, 2020, the national cryptography strategy to 2030 with a vision to 2045, and Resolution 57-NQ/TW of December 22, 2024, on science, technology and digital transformation. Two Prime Ministerial decisions of July 2026 turned those into programs: Decision 125/QĐ-TTg of July 6, 2026 approved the scheme for developing a quantum-resistant cryptographic system for 2026 to 2035, and Decision 1226/QĐ-TTg of July 7, 2026 approved a scheme for civil cryptography research, development and application for 2026 to 2030 with a direction to 2035. The three drafts are the first visible technical output of the first decision.
The drafts are standards in the Vietnamese TCVN national system, so once promulgated they carry into procurement specifications, conformity testing and the licensing regime for civil cryptographic products that the committee administers. ML-KEM is the key encapsulation mechanism NIST published as FIPS 203 in August 2024, since folded by ISO into the amendment the Vietnamese draft cites. ML-DSA is the lattice-based signature NIST published as FIPS 204 the same day. HB-PQSign is the one with no foreign twin: a hash-based post-quantum signature, revised from an earlier version, designed for signature security and for applicability within Vietnamese systems. Vietnamese reporting adds that the technical specifications are being posted on the portals of the committee, the Ministry of National Defense and the national standards authority, and VOV's English service reports a dedicated website opened to collect reviews from scientists, specialists and technology companies.
Hash-based signatures are the conservative corner of post-quantum design. Their security rests only on the properties of the underlying hash function, with no structured algebraic problem for a new attack to exploit, which is why NIST standardized the stateless scheme SLH-DSA as FIPS 205 beside the lattice schemes, as a backup whose failure modes are uncorrelated with theirs. The price is size and speed, and the stateful variants demand key management that never reuses a one-time key. The public reports of the Hanoi workshop do not say whether HB-PQSign is stateful or stateless, what hash function it uses, what its signature and key sizes are, or what the revision changed. The comment period exists to surface exactly those questions.
Quantum pillar: post-quantum cryptography (standards and certification). Use posture: defensive. Technology readiness: not applicable. The development is a set of three draft national standards opened for public comment, a policy instrument that selects algorithms for Vietnam's state networks without placing any device, implementation or field trial on the readiness ladder.
The 2027, 2030, 2033 and 2035 milestones under Decision 125/QĐ-TTg, and why Vietnam makes QKD an auxiliary technology
The workshop set out the national transition roadmap in four steps. By 2027 the committee intends to complete the national technical standards for post-quantum algorithms, products and security equipment. By 2030 it intends to complete hybrid integration of post-quantum cryptography across the information systems that matter to national security, meaning the new algorithms run alongside the existing ones. By 2033 it plans supplementary standards covering both post-quantum cryptography and quantum key distribution. By 2035 the target is that 100 percent of critical national security information systems have moved to quantum-resistant cryptography. Major General Hương summarized the governing principles as cautious, synchronized and uninterrupted, and he framed the threat as harvest now, decrypt later: encrypted data collected today can be stored against the day a quantum computer can read it, which makes key exchange on long-lived data urgent before any such machine exists.
The roadmap is explicit about the division of labor between the two quantum-era technologies. Post-quantum cryptography is the core solution for nationwide conversion. Quantum key distribution is an auxiliary technology, to be applied selectively to a small number of critical national communications networks, the ordering most Western security agencies and, two weeks earlier, the Dutch government also reached. The roadmap also helps place Vietnam against the assessment Quentir covered in September, in which Malaysia stood alone at Tier 1 and Vietnam sat at Tier 2 among the ten ASEAN states on public evidence gathered through mid-August 2026. That assessment credited instruments with legal force and money behind them. A Prime Ministerial decision, a roadmap with years attached and draft national standards in public consultation are exactly the evidence that moves a state up that ladder, and all three arrived after the assessment's cutoff.
Decision 1226/QĐ-TTg, the companion civil-cryptography scheme signed by Deputy Prime Minister Phan Văn Giang on July 7, 2026, supplies the industrial side. According to the Vietnam News Agency's summary, it targets domestic cryptographic products at 20 to 30 percent of use in important information systems by 2030, 10 to 15 domestic supplier enterprises, and at least 5,000 trained specialists by 2035. Read together, the two decisions describe a state that wants both the algorithms and the companies implementing them to be Vietnamese wherever its most sensitive systems are concerned.
What a home-grown hash-based signature gives Vietnam's defense and government networks, and what a buyer still cannot check
Read as capability, the package is defensive, and the beneficiary is the Vietnamese state. A signature standard decides who can issue an order, update a system or authenticate a document in a way the receiving system will trust. For a defense ministry, that covers firmware on radios and sensors, software updates on command systems and the identity of every device on a classified network. Signatures on algorithms a quantum computer cannot forge are what stop an adversary with such a machine from impersonating headquarters, and key exchange on ML-KEM is what stops stored traffic from being read later. The 2030 hybrid milestone is the point at which both protections would run on the systems the committee cares about most, with the old algorithms still in place as a second lock.
The home-grown algorithm serves a different purpose from the two adopted ones, and the committee's own framing makes it plain. Dr. Toàn presented the transition as a contest in core technological sovereignty, and he described mastery across four layers: design and proof, cryptanalysis, secure implementation, and standardization and validation. A state that can only do the last two depends on others for the first two. By standardizing a hash-based design of its own next to the lattice schemes, Vietnam keeps a signature path whose security rests on different mathematics from ML-DSA and whose specification it controls. If lattice cryptanalysis ever advances, the scenario Quentir's general blog examined when the HAWK signature scheme left NIST's standards track after a model-assisted attack, the hash-based path stays up. The same reasoning led NIST to keep SLH-DSA.
The sovereignty argument cuts both ways, and that is where a buyer should slow down. A hash-based scheme is only as trustworthy as its hash function, its parameter choices and its handling of state, and as far as the public reports show, the revised national design has no published cryptanalysis from outside its authors yet. Vietnamese press coverage says the committee has invited international cryptanalysts to review the drafts, and the comment period is where the design earns or loses its standing. Until that review exists in public, an outside planner should treat HB-PQSign as a national profile under evaluation, short of the scrutiny ML-KEM and ML-DSA accumulated across an eight-year open competition.
For a vendor, the practical consequence is a dual stack. Equipment sold into Vietnamese government and defense networks will eventually need to produce and verify HB-PQSign signatures beside ML-DSA, and the 2027 target for standards covering products and security equipment means conformity testing against TCVN profiles will follow soon after. That is a crypto-agility test of the ordinary kind: can a product add a national signature algorithm without a hardware change, and can its certificate handling carry two signature types through a hybrid period the roadmap expects to last from 2030 to 2035. Products that hard-wired one algorithm family into silicon will struggle.
What the sources establish is clear enough: a military-ranked national cryptography authority has published three draft standards, two aligned with the international lattice algorithms and one of its own hash-based design, under a Prime Ministerial decision with milestones in 2027, 2030, 2033 and 2035, and has opened them for comment. What they do not establish is the home-grown algorithm's parameters, performance, statefulness or external review, how much of the state's cryptographic estate has been inventoried, what the 2030 hybrid milestone will cost, or which systems count as critical for the 2035 target. Those are the figures a program office would need before relying on this roadmap, and the ones to watch as the comment period runs and the 2027 standards arrive.
Sources
Primary source: Ban Cơ yếu Chính phủ (Government Cipher Committee of Vietnam), news item on the workshop 'Công bố 03 dự thảo tiêu chuẩn quốc gia về mật mã hậu lượng tử', Hanoi, October 17, 2026, with Major General Hồ Văn Hương opening and Dr. Nguyễn Quốc Toàn presenting the drafts. Other material: Báo Điện tử Chính phủ report of October 17, 2026 (policy trail, Decisions 125/QĐ-TTg and 1226/QĐ-TTg, roadmap); VOV English report of October 17, 2026 (QKD as auxiliary technology, comment website); NIST FIPS 205 page (SLH-DSA, stateless hash-based signatures); VietnamPlus summary of Decision 1226/QĐ-TTg of July 7, 2026. The capability reading, the comparison with the September 2026 ASEAN assessment and the buyer questions are Quentir analysis.