South Korea

What's verified

South Korea has run a national post-quantum algorithm competition to completion and is now piloting the results across government infrastructure, but none of it is legally required yet, and the algorithms it selected are not yet approved for the government systems that would eventually have to use them.

KISA's own competition ran two rounds: 16 candidates in 2022, narrowed to 8 in December 2023, and a final selection of four algorithms on 16 January 2025 — confirmed directly from the KpqC Research Group's own results page. Two are key-establishment mechanisms, NTRU+ and SMAUG-T, and two are signature schemes, HAETAE and AIMer. Final specification documents for all four were posted 30 January 2026.

As of April 2026, KpqC's own notice board states that standardisation proposals for the two key-establishment algorithms (NTRU+, SMAUG-T) have been submitted to Korea's national standards body, while the two signature algorithms remain under review before a proposal is made — and the notice itself warns that "the algorithms may change during the standardization process." None of the four currently carries a national standard number.

What's actually binding, and what isn't

Korea's cryptography-validation scheme, KCMVP, is the operative binding mechanism: under the e-Government Act and its enforcement decree, the head of an administrative agency "shall" take security measures using cryptographic modules validated by the Director of the National Intelligence Service. We checked the current KCMVP validated-algorithm list directly. It contains ARIA, SEED, LEA, HIGHT, and AES as block ciphers; SHA-2, LSH, and SHA-3 as hash functions; RSA-PSS, KCDSA, EC-KCDSA, and ECDSA for signatures; and DH/ECDH for key establishment. It contains no post-quantum algorithm of any kind — not KpqC's own four, and not NIST's ML-KEM, ML-DSA, or SLH-DSA.

MSIT's own May 2026 release confirms why: one of four funded R&D tasks running through 2030 is explicitly "to introduce PQC into the domestic KCMVP scheme," describing evaluation technology for the correctness and safety of PQC implementations as a capability that does not yet exist. Until that work lands, no PQC algorithm — Korean or NIST's — can be validated for use in a Korean government system, regardless of what any transition plan recommends.

Two transition plans, neither published in full

The government has announced two rounds of national PQC policy, and both are attested to us only through a technical agency's own summary rather than a document we could read directly.

In July 2023, the government announced a national PQC transition master plan ("汎국가 양자내성암호 전환 마스터플랜") jointly with related ministries. KISA's technical portal describes it in passing: "국내에서는 2023년 7월, 관계 부처와 협력하여 「汎국가 양자내성암호 전환 마스터플랜」을 공표" ("Domestically, in July 2023, in cooperation with related ministries, the Pan-National PQC Transition Master Plan was publicly announced"). We searched Korea's official press-release portal and the National Intelligence Service's own press board directly for the announcement text and found that neither institution has published the plan itself; the 2023 event introduced the plan rather than releasing it as a document.

That plan has a named successor: the "汎국가 양자내성 암호체계 전환 종합 추진계획" ("Pan-National PQC System Transition Comprehensive Implementation Plan"), reported elsewhere as launched around September 2025 and referenced on KISA's portal as the instrument under which the four KpqC finalists will be standardised. This successor plan's full text is likewise not posted publicly as far as we could establish.

Government pilots are real and expanding

Separate from the plans themselves, MSIT has funded and reported on two rounds of pilot deployment. The first, in 2025, covered energy (KEPCO smart metering), medical records, and a national administrative certification system. The second, announced May 2026, expanded to five more sectors: telecommunications (a national research network), finance (payment infrastructure), transport (connected-vehicle infrastructure), defence, and satellite communications. MSIT's December 2025 report on the first round states seven algorithms were used across the pilots — the four KpqC algorithms plus NIST's ML-KEM, ML-DSA, and SLH-DSA side by side, with no stated government preference between the two families.

What we checked and did not find

• KISA's page frames the widely-quoted year 2035 as an industry forecast for when a cryptographically relevant quantum computer is expected to emerge, not as a Korean government completion deadline. We found no primary Korean source stating a target year for finishing the PQC transition.
• Neither the 2023 master plan nor the 2025 successor plan has a publicly posted full text at any government domain we could reach.
• No Korean instrument mandates a hybrid (classical-plus-PQC) deployment approach. The only primary-source reference to "hybrid" is a funded research task combining PQC with quantum key distribution, a different technology, not a classical/PQC pairing.
• No TTAK.KO or KS standard number has been issued for any of the four KpqC algorithms; standardisation proposals for the two key-establishment algorithms were only submitted as of April 2026.