Root Causes: A PKI and Security Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Root Causes 618: MTC and Private PKI May 15, 2026

Show notes

Repeat guest Bas Westerbaan of Cloudflare joins us to explore the role of Merkle Tree Certificates in private CA scenarios with an eye toward where they will be needed and where traditional PKI will be better suited.

Root Causes 617: What Are X9 Certificates? May 13, 2026

Show notes

The US-based X9 financial industry consortium has created a server certificate. We explain what X9 certificates are and suitable use cases for this certificate type.

Root Causes 616: NIST and Merkle Tree Certificates May 11, 2026

Show notes

Dustin Moody of NIST joins us to discuss Merkle Tree Certificates (MTC) and the NIST position on them.

Root Causes 615: What Is IETF PLANTS? May 08, 2026

Show notes

Repeat guest Bas Westerbaan of Cloudflare joins us to explain the PLANTS working group in IETF, which is driving standards around post quantum cryptography (PQC) and Merkle Tree Certificates (MTC). Bas explains the path to becoming a final standard, where we are in this process, and how you can get involved.

Root Causes 614: MTC and Downgrade Attacks May 06, 2026

Show notes

It's reasonable to believe that Merkle Tree Certificates (MTC) and traditional RSA will co-exist on the same servers for years, if not decades, during the transition to post quantum cryptography (PQC). Bas Westerbaan of Cloudflare joins us in this episode to explore the possibility of quantum downgrade attacks and what we can do about them.

Root Causes 613: Status of the NIST PQC Contests May 04, 2026

Show notes

We are joined by Dustin Moody of NIST to go over the current state of the various post quantum cryptography (PQC) contests, including upcoming FIPS standards for Falcon (FN-DSA) and HQC, other Round 4 algorithms, the digital signing algorithm (DSA) On Ramp, isogeny, and future cryptographic exploration.

Root Causes 612: What Do Subscribers Need for MTC? May 01, 2026

Show notes

We are joined by Bas Westerbaan of Cloudflare to explain considerations and requirements for use of Merkle Tree Certificates (MTC). This includes full adoption of TLS 1.3, offering PQC and RSA at the same time, the imperative value of automation, and running production MTC in 2027.

Root Causes 611: Merkle Tree Certificates, What and Why Apr 29, 2026

Show notes

There are strong reasons to believe that the architecture of PQC TLS will take the form of Merkle Tree Certificates (MTC). We are joined by post quantum cryptography expert Bas Westerbaan of Cloudflare as he explains this new PKI architecture, how it works, and why we need it. We define new concepts like landmark certificates and log mirrors and discuss what's necessary to move to this new architecture.

Root Causes 610: Types of Logical Qubits Apr 27, 2026

Show notes

We describe three different kinds of logical qubits with their relative strengths and weaknesses.

Root Causes 609: Side Channel Apocalypse Apr 24, 2026

Show notes

Jason explains the extreme danger of side channel attacks in the new post quantum cryptography (PQC) era.