Samsung S25 Goes PQC

YouTube: https://youtu.be/hcdk3u2R5Mo

Yesterday, I gave two short presentations on PQC (Post Quantum Cryptography), and next week, I’m in London to give a more focused talk on the subject. And so, it’s great to see that Samsung is driving forward the adoption of PQC methods in their new S25 smartphone.

There are two companies that have a core focus on creating trusted hardware for consumers: Apple and Samsung. Apple has always had a core focus on making sure they use the best cryptography to not only secure their devices but also to make them privacy-aware. Samsung, too, has strived for improved security but, at times, has made a few slip-ups along the way, but always patched around them. Now, Samsung Electronics has integrated PQC into their Galaxy S25 series of devices.

The need for this is that NIST will deprecate all our existing public key methods in 2030, including: RSA for public key encryption; RSA, ECDSA and EdDSA for signatures; and ECDH for key exchange. NIST will then remove them in 2035 from the NIST FIPS 140 standard. Given that a smartphone will have a life of at least five years, it makes sense to build the hardware to support the migration. Along with this, we see the rise of “harvest now, decrypt later” threats, where network traffic could be captured now and then decrypted sometime in the future.

The main integration at the current time involved ML-KEM (FIPS 203, aka Kyber) and ML-DSA (FIPS 204, aka Dilithium). With ML-KEM we replace key exchange and public key encryption methods, while ML-DSA provides us with digital signing:

These methods will be the Samsung Knox Matrix for enhanced data protection — this includes end-to-encryption for back-ups and the recovery of data from the Samsung Cloud. Overall, Samsung devices, like Apple hardware, have a secure enclave to store private and secret keys, and where not even Samsung can get access to them.

The usage of PQC will mean that Samsung devices will be able to communicate with other devices in the future and which are using PQC methods. This ensures not only current compatibility but also future compatibility. An important advancement of the industry is that Samsung will support PQC methods for their backup system to their Cloud.

Conclusions

Of course, the integration will not force applications and services to use PQC, and in most cases, it will still use our traditional methods, as devices that it connects to must support PQC. Thus, we will see a migration towards PQC, rather than a hard switch-over. In cryptography, this is often the case, as we can typically negotiate the cryptography methods that are used in the secure transmission or storage of data. Once all the required services and applications support PQC, our existing public key methods will likely be switched off.