France’s national cybersecurity agency, the Agence nationale de la sécurité des systèmes d’information (ANSSI), announced June 16 it will stop certifying security products lacking quantum-resistant encryption from 2027, forcing government bodies and critical infrastructure operators to transition away from older cryptographic systems.
ANSSI Chief of Staff Samih Souissi made the announcement at the France Quantum conference in Paris. Because ANSSI certification is mandatory for French government agencies and critical infrastructure, the policy functions as a de facto phase-out of legacy encryption. Souissi said businesses should purchase only quantum-safe products by 2030.
“It’s not only a technical issue. It’s a matter of governance, industrial planning, regulation, and sovereignty,” Souissi said.
The announcement builds on a certification track already operational. In October 2025, ANSSI issued its first quantum-safe security approval to Thales, evaluated by the CEA-Leti laboratory. The solution utilizes post-quantum digital signature algorithms standardized by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).
France is the first European nation to enforce mandatory post-quantum cryptography (PQC) certification.
Souissi cited “harvest now, decrypt later” attacks, in which adversaries collect encrypted data today and hold it until future quantum hardware can unlock it. IBM Quantum’s Jerry Chow said the threat could emerge by the mid-2030s.
“As a French and European player, we face even more constraints, as we will need to align with all these standards,” Fanny Bouton, head of quantum at OVHcloud, said at the conference. Pascal Brier, chief innovation officer at Capgemini, said demand from banks and public services is accelerating. “That market is becoming big. It’s going to be very substantial,” he said.
Qperfect, a French quantum computing firm, warned that the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA), a standard used in blockchain systems, could be among the first cryptographic schemes broken by a quantum computer.
