Saudi Arabia Has the Strongest PQC Mandate in the World, and Almost Everyone Cites the Wrong Document

Buried in a Saudi Arabian cryptographic standard most Western compliance writing doesn't cite correctly is the single strongest post-quantum cryptography requirement on record anywhere in the world: a present-tense, unconditional mandate that every cryptographic system support PQC algorithms, with no grace period and no future tense.

The clause that outranks everything else on this tracker

NCS-2:2025 -- the National Cryptographic Standards, version 2:2025, published by Saudi Arabia's National Cybersecurity Authority (NCA) -- states its own force directly in its introduction:

"تحدد المعايير الوطنية للتشفير (NCS-2:2025) الحد الأدنى لمتطلبات التشفير المطلوب من الجهات الوطنية الالتزام..." ("The National Cryptographic Standards (NCS-2:2025) set the minimum cryptographic requirements that national entities are required to comply with...")

Section 2-5-5, "Post-Quantum Algorithms," names NIST-standardized algorithms by their FIPS numbers -- ML-KEM per FIPS 203 (ML-KEM-512/768 for baseline, ML-KEM-1024 for advanced), Classic McEliece, ML-DSA per FIPS 204, and SLH-DSA per FIPS 205 -- and then states, in two operative clauses:

"٢-٥-٥-١ يجب استخدام نظم التشفير لما بعد الحوسبة الكمية؛ مع نظم تشفير كلاسيكية." ("§2-5-5-1: Post-quantum cryptography systems must be used, together with classical cryptography systems.")

"٢-٥-٥-٢ يجب أن تدعم جميع نظم وحلول التشفير خوارزميات التشفير لما بعد الحوسبة الكمية (PQC)." ("§2-5-5-2: All cryptographic systems and solutions must support post-quantum cryptography (PQC) algorithms.")

Compare that to the two phrases every other jurisdiction's PQC language leans on: a deadline year ("by 2030"), or a planning obligation ("develop a migration plan"). NCS-2:2025 has neither. It states a requirement that applies now, to systems that exist now, full stop. No other national cryptographic standard on this tracker reads that way.

There's a second, smaller requirement most coverage misses entirely: Section 8 covers Quantum Key Distribution, with five sub-clauses requiring hybrid implementations (PQC algorithms alongside classical ones for authentication and key agreement), continuous QBER monitoring, and conformance to ISO/IEC 23837. QKD is a different technology from PQC -- physical quantum-mechanical key exchange rather than quantum-resistant math -- and Saudi Arabia is one of the few jurisdictions regulating both in the same document.

The citation that's wrong almost everywhere

If you've read a vendor blog or compliance consultancy's writeup of Saudi Arabian cryptography requirements, there's a good chance it cited ECC-2:2024 -- NCA's "Essential Cybersecurity Controls" -- as the source of this quantum-risk mandate. Cyberarrow, Wattlecorp, and Entrust all make this attribution, among others.

It's wrong. We fetched ECC-2:2024 directly and read it in full. It contains zero occurrences of "quantum," "post-quantum," or "PQC," anywhere in the document. The actual mandate lives in a completely separate document -- NCS-2:2025 -- that a surprising amount of secondary coverage never seems to have opened.

This matters beyond pedantry. A compliance team told to check ECC-2:2024 for PQC requirements will find nothing and conclude, reasonably but wrongly, that Saudi Arabia has no binding PQC mandate. The actual document sits one standard number over.

What the standard doesn't do

NCS-2:2025 is, in one specific way, less complete than roadmap-style documents from the EU, UK, US, or Canada: it names no deadline. There's no year attached to the requirement -- it's binding now, in the present tense, but the standard gives no phased timeline, no "by 2030" marker, nothing to plan a multi-year migration budget against. It also names no cryptographic-inventory or CBOM requirement; an organization reading NCS-2:2025 alone has no guidance on how to discover which of its systems are actually in scope.

That absence is worth noting precisely because the mandate itself is so strong. A requirement with no deadline and no inventory mechanism is, in practice, a requirement that's easy to be in violation of without knowing it -- you can't verify compliance with "all cryptographic systems and solutions must support PQC" without first knowing what your cryptographic systems and solutions are.

SAMA, the Saudi central bank, has not filled that gap either. Its Cyber Security Framework -- including its own dedicated Cryptography principle -- was read in full and contains zero mentions of quantum computing. SAMA-regulated banks are bound by NCS-2:2025 as the national standard, but SAMA hasn't issued sector-specific guidance of its own on how to get there.

What to do with this

If your organization operates cryptographic systems in Saudi Arabia, or sells software or hardware into entities that do, NCS-2:2025 is not a future planning exercise -- it's a current requirement with the algorithm names already specified. The practical first question isn't "when do we need to migrate" (the standard doesn't say), it's "which of our systems are in scope and which of them already don't comply" -- which requires an actual inventory of where cryptography lives in your stack, something NCS-2:2025 assumes you already have and doesn't tell you how to build.

The Saudi Arabia country page tracks NCS-2:2025 and the ECC-2:2024 misattribution with full primary-source citations.