Cloudflare launches post-quantum GeoKey Manager for geographically restricted key management

Details

Cloudflare launched the PQ GeoKey Manager in closed beta as part of its Data Localization Suite, with general availability planned for Q1 2027.
The system protects against "harvest now, decrypt later" attacks by using hybrid ML-KEM-768 and X25519 cryptography to wrap decryption keys so they can only be unwrapped by servers in an authorized region.
Regional root keys are 256-bit symmetric secrets stored in the Linux kernel keyring of authorized edge servers, ensuring they never leave their designated geography.
The design fails closed, rejecting requests if a regional root key is missing or if a server attempts to decrypt a key outside its authorized region.
Application-specific keys are derived from regional root keys using HPKE (RFC 9180) with HKDF-SHA-256 and AES-256-GCM for authenticated encryption.
Key rotation supports both soft rotation, which retains limited access to previous epochs, and hard rotation, which rewraps keys under a new epoch to remove old access.
Edge server authorization relies on Trusted Platform Module (TPM) hardware identity and Zinc inventory data to determine regional membership and key access rights.

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