Plain English — promise
NIST's post-quantum standards, explained
In August 2024 the US standards body NIST finalised the first post-quantum cryptography standards — the algorithms designed to stay secure even against quantum computers. Here's what FIPS 203, 204 and 205 actually are, and why they matter for documents that must stay verifiable for decades.
The three standards
FIPS 203 — ML-KEM
Key encapsulation: protects data in transit against harvest-now, decrypt-later attacks. It's the encryption half of the transition.
FIPS 204 — ML-DSA
Digital signatures. This is the one that matters for sealed documents: it proves who signed a file and that nothing changed afterwards — and it stays provable in a post-quantum world.
FIPS 205 — SLH-DSA
A signature scheme built on different mathematics — the conservative fallback if lattice cryptography is ever weakened.
Why this matters for legal documents
A signature only protects a document for as long as the algorithm behind it stands. Settlement records, court documents and compliance files are kept for decades — long enough that a signature made today could face a quantum-equipped forger tomorrow. That's why the ASD's ISM sets an end-2030 deadline for the systems it governs to move to ML-DSA, and why the sensible time to sign with it is now, not at the deadline.
Where Omitly fits
Every Omitly seal today is signed with Ed25519 over a SHA-256 digest of the whole delivered PDF — real, shipped, and verifiable offline in the app or the free npm verifier. A hybrid seal carrying ML-DSA-87 — the strongest parameter set in FIPS 204 and the ASD's named preference — alongside classical ECDSA P-384 is on our roadmap, not shipped yet. When it ships, the plan is for it to be the default with no settings and no upgrade project — but until then, this page describes what the seal does today, not what it will do.
Which algorithms does the ASD actually approve? ASD-approved cryptography, explained →
Seal documents to the standard that outlives the algorithm
Omitly redacts and seals PDFs entirely on your computer — Ed25519 signing by default today, with a hybrid post-quantum seal on the roadmap.