Week ending October 30, 2026 — Sector Watch

NIST published the final version of its post-quantum transition report on October 27, and on October 28 the DKIM2 mechanism draft changed how a post-quantum signature is carried on an email message. NIST IR 8547 deprecates RSA, ECDSA and EdDSA signatures after 2030, disallows them after 2035, and accepts dual signatures on e-mail as long as one component is NIST-approved. Revision 08 of the DKIM2 draft removes the composite ML-DSA-44 and Ed25519 algorithm that revision 07 added ten days earlier, and defines pure ML-DSA-44 as a third algorithm alongside RSA and Ed25519. A DKIM2 signer that wants a hybrid now attaches two ordinary signatures and states whether a verifier needs both to pass or either one. Every DKIM2 verifier must implement all three algorithms.

Standards in motion

Email authentication & anti-abuse

DKIM2 dropped its composite post-quantum algorithm and made hybrid signing a combination rule. Revision 08 of the mechanism draft was posted October 28. Revision 07, posted October 18, had added a composite algorithm, MLDSA44-Ed25519-SHA512. Revision 08 replaces it with pure ML-DSA-44 from FIPS 204, which signs the header field values directly rather than a pre-computed hash, using “DKIM2” as the context string. The signature tag now takes groups: a comma-separated list passes only if every signature in it passes, and a set of lists separated by | passes if any one list does. Body and header hashes get the same rules. The draft gives the reason as phased deployment of new algorithms and hybrid schemes “should algorithms not be fully trusted.”

Signers may use any of RSA-SHA256, Ed25519-SHA256 and ML-DSA-44. Verifiers must implement all three, plus SHA-256 and SHA-512. An ML-DSA-44 signature is 3,228 base64 characters and has to be folded across header lines. The draft still permits 1,024-bit RSA keys, with 2,048 bits as a SHOULD; NIST’s transition table starts RSA at 112 bits of security strength, which is 2,048-bit keys. Adoption read: open, spec-stage, in a neutral body, with the working group’s IESG submission milestone at March 2027 (covered October 23).

NIST

NIST finalized its post-quantum schedule for signatures. NIST IR 8547, Transition to Post-Quantum Cryptography Standards, was published October 27. Its table deprecates ECDSA and RSA at 112 bits of classical security strength or more, and EdDSA at 128 bits or more, after 2030, and disallows all three under NIST standards after 2035. SP 800-57 Part 1 had projected disallowing 112-bit public-key schemes on January 1, 2031; the report replaces that with the 2030 and 2035 dates for every quantum-vulnerable signature algorithm. On hybrids, it accepts dual signatures, two or more signatures on a common message, on user data such as e-mail or on certificates, provided at least one component algorithm is NIST-approved. Federal high-value assets and high-impact systems face the earlier deadlines in EO 14412, 2031 for digital signatures. Adoption read: binding on federal systems under NIST standards; guidance for everyone else.

IETF

STIR’s proposed charter now puts certificate transparency and out-of-band discovery on the standards track. A revision of the proposed charter posted October 28 changes two work items from informational or experimental documents to standards-track. One is certificate transparency for telephone identity credentials, to make issuance auditable and misissuance detectable. The other extends out-of-band mechanisms for discovering STIR credentials and services tied to a telephone number, including connected identity where SIP signaling is not end-to-end, with messaging named as a context the group will consider. The change brings the scope text into line with the milestones, which already called for Proposed Standards on both. Governance of transparency services stays out of scope. The entity-identifier work item covered October 16 is unchanged.

The charter has not cleared. External review drew no other comments, and it is on the IESG’s November 5 agenda for approval. Adoption read: the base protocols are deployed across SIP networks; the new work items have no adopted documents until the charter is approved.

Capital & motivation

Numeracle raised $28 million and plans to take its business verification beyond voice. Edison Partners was the sole investor in the round, announced October 28. Numeracle had raised $6.8 million before it, according to Crunchbase News, which reports about 4,000 business customers and profitability this year. Numeracle verifies that a business is real, links it to the numbers it calls from, shares that data with the systems carriers use to label calls, and charges per call to display a verified name, logo and call reason. It also sells the verification to other platforms as Know Your Customer as a Service. The new money is for messaging, chat apps, marketplaces, AI agents and international expansion.

Neither announcement names a standard. They do not say whether a business Numeracle vets receives anything portable, such as a credential it could present to another verifier or carry in a signed call, or whether the result exists only in the data Numeracle supplies to carrier analytics. On what is public, the service is unclassifiable on the open–proprietary axis, and that is the question to put to Numeracle before building on it in a new channel. STI-GA selected Numeracle in July to design its vetting framework for non-jurisdictional governance authorities. The open model for carrying a vetting result is GSMA Foundry’s Open Verifiable Calling, which separates the vetter, signer and verifier roles and expresses the vetting result as a verifiable credential.