NTISB Wrote Pakistan’s Cryptographic Rulebook and Left the Last Page Blank

NTISB’s Pakistan Security Standard is the sole document in the country’s cryptographic rulebook that acknowledges post-quantum cryptography exists. It does so in a single sentence that defers the actual work to a future edition, and that edition is now due.

Of every cryptographic rule Pakistan has written, exactly one acknowledges that the quantum problem exists, and it does so in a single deferring sentence. The Pakistan Security Standard, issued by the National Telecommunication and Information Technology Security Board, notes that once post-quantum algorithms are standardised they will be incorporated in the next update of the standard. Those algorithms were standardised by NIST in August 2024. The next update is now the most consequential document NTISB is not yet known to be drafting, and this closing article is about why it should be, and how little it would take.

The standard itself deserves credit before it draws criticism. Issued in June 2023 through a statutory notification and becoming mandatory across the market in June 2028, with an accelerated deadline of December 2025 for defence procurement, it replaced a reference memorandum that had been in service since 1994. It grades cryptographic equipment across four security levels and cryptographic primitives across three strength grades, aligns itself with the American FIPS 140-2 and the international Common Criteria, and routes evaluation through accredited laboratories. Its reach is deliberately wide, naming NADRA, aviation, immigration, and social-protection systems among the bodies expected to comply. This is a serious piece of standards work, and the country is better for having it.

Its design also happens to be its escape route, which is the encouraging part of the story. Rather than blessing a fixed list of named algorithms, the standard grades primitives by their parameters, so a public-key scheme qualifies by key length and a hash by output length. RSA and elliptic-curve signatures are named explicitly and graded by strength, while block ciphers and hash functions are graded generically enough that the standard describes what it needs rather than which product supplies it. That parameter-based structure means adding post-quantum schemes does not require tearing the document up, because ML-KEM and ML-DSA can be introduced as new graded rows alongside the existing ones. A standard built as a whitelist would need rewriting, whereas this one needs extending.

The gap that remains is nonetheless real and worth stating plainly. As written, the standard that becomes law for Pakistani industry in 2028 contains no post-quantum algorithm and no reference to the NIST post-quantum standards, only the promise to add them later. Meanwhile the United States has bound its agencies to migrate by 2030, the European Union has set 2030 and 2035 milestones, and NIST plans to disallow the current public-key algorithms after 2035. A Pakistani product certified against the standard in 2028, and expected to remain in service for years, would carry a clean bill of health for cryptography its largest trading partners will by then be phasing out. The standard is also reviewed on a three-year cycle, which places a natural revision point around 2026, so the timing to close the gap could hardly be more convenient.

What NTISB should publish is short, and its brevity is the point. A two-page annex to the standard, adding ML-KEM-1024 and ML-DSA-87 as graded primitives and defining a hybrid transitional profile that pairs a post-quantum scheme with a classical one until confidence and tooling mature, would deliver exactly the update the standard already promised. Nothing about that annex requires new primary legislation, a new institution, or foreign assistance, because it borrows directly from the hybrid approach the European standards bodies have already published. It would also let every downstream body the standard governs, NADRA and the banks and the telecom operators discussed earlier in this series, inherit a post-quantum baseline from a single upstream change rather than each solving the problem alone.

This series began by observing that Pakistan’s institutional silence on the quantum transition was itself the story, and NTISB is where that silence is easiest to end, because the standard has already left a blank line reserved for the answer. Post-quantum algorithms exist, they are standardised, and the document that pledged to incorporate them is due for its scheduled review. Filling in that reserved line is a smaller task than any of the systems downstream will face if it stays blank, and it is the one move in this entire series that a single institution could complete on its own before the year is out.

Sourcing:
Pakistan Security Standard (PS: 5544-2021), SRO 762(I)/2023, public guidebook;
NIST FIPS 203/204/205 (Aug 2024);
US EO 14412;
EU NIS roadmap;
NIST post-2035 disallow timeline;
PISF 2026 cabinet approval (reported Aug 2026)