Abu Dhabi Advances Government-Wide Post-Quantum Encryption Across Public Systems

Abu Dhabi is progressing toward embedding post-quantum encryption protocols across government technology systems as an early step to build visibility and sovereign control ahead of the quantum era, Gulf News reported. The initiative involves investments by the UAE Cybersecurity Council and the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) into sovereign encryption protocols engineered for cryptographic agility.

According to H.E. Najyb Al Maskari, Executive Director of the Government Cybersecurity Operations Sector at the Department of Government Enablement (DGE), the protocols are intended to secure data transactions between various government departments, including finance and health, as well as public-facing citizen services on the TAMM platform. Al Maskari added that major cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, are actively investing in post-quantum tools and publishing transition timelines to assist client organisations.

Dr Victor Mateu, chief researcher at TII's Cryptography Research Centre, stated that entities are now completing their first successful cryptographic inventories to identify existing security algorithms. He noted that the discovery phase remains a primary hurdle, as IT teams frequently encounter deprecated background services still running and transferring data without their awareness.

Pradeep Menon, Chief AI and Security Officer at Paramount Assure, noted that while some advanced entities have initiated formal evaluations, most organisations remain in the discovery phase. In addition to identifying cryptographic footprints, Menon highlighted third-party vendor dependencies as a major challenge, requiring migration schedules to align with external suppliers or transition to new providers.