LATICE is the Australian Signals Directorate’s five-phase framework for moving an organisation off traditional asymmetric cryptography: Locate, Assess, Triage, Implement, and Communicate and educate. It appears in ASD’s guidance Planning for post-quantum cryptography, and it comes with a firm completion date. ASD recommends that organisations stop using traditional asymmetric cryptography by the end of 2030, five years ahead of the UK’s 2035 date for completing migration.
The guidance is published by ASD’s Australian Cyber Security Centre on cyber.gov.au. It was first published in July 2022, last updated in September 2025, and is written to support organisations that apply ASD’s Information security manual (ISM). The framework itself is not specific to Australia, though. It is a clear, practical sequence for any organisation planning the transition, and it is worth reading closely for what it puts first.
What LATICE stands for
LATICE has six letters but five phases, because communicating and educating are treated as a single phase. In ASD’s own words:
- Locate and inventory the use of traditional asymmetric cryptography.
- Assess the value and sensitivity of systems and data protected by traditional asymmetric cryptography.
- Triage systems using traditional asymmetric cryptography and prioritise individual systems for transition.
- Implement post-quantum cryptographic algorithms throughout systems.
- Communicate with vendors and stakeholders, and educate and train relevant stakeholders on the PQC transition.
The name is hard to miss for anyone who works with the new standards: ML-KEM (FIPS 203) and ML-DSA (FIPS 204) are both lattice-based algorithms. The framework does not depend on the spelling, but it makes the phases easy to remember.
The date behind the framework: end of 2030
In the ISM, ASD recommends ceasing the use of traditional asymmetric cryptography by the end of 2030. The guidance names the algorithms this covers: RSA, Diffie-Hellman (DH), Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) and the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA). In their place, ASD recommends the post-quantum algorithms approved in the ISM’s Guidelines for cryptography.
Two details are easy to miss. First, ASD says adoption by the end of 2030 already “includes contingencies for disruptive technology breakthroughs and other external factors”, and asks organisations to add their own contingencies for internal factors that could delay them. Second, the date is early compared with other published timelines. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre sets 2035 as the point by which migration should be complete across all systems, services and products.
The timeline diagram in ASD’s guidance shows the reasoning. It plots the estimated likelihood of a cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) rising from “less likely” at 2030 to “more likely” by 2040, and shades “the period of vulnerability for critical data (with a 10-year lifespan) compromised by ‘harvest now, decrypt later’ attacks before PQC transition”.
Four milestones, and the first one is close
To guide organisations to a completed transition by the end of 2030, ASD sets out high-level milestones:
- By end of 2026: a refined plan for the transition to PQC, accounting for the organisation’s security goals, risk tolerances, dependencies and the value of its data.
- By end of 2028: the transition has commenced, starting with critical systems and data. That means prioritising systems that are critical to the function of the organisation, handle highly sensitive or classified data or data with long-lived confidentiality requirements, or are likely to be difficult or time-consuming to update.
- By end of 2030: the transition is complete.
- Post-2030: continual monitoring and validation of PQC implementations, including monitoring for vulnerabilities, optimising performance and adapting to changes in the quantum threat landscape.
At the time of writing, the end of 2026 is less than four months away. The word ASD chose for that first milestone is “refined”, which reads as a plan being sharpened rather than one being started.
Locate: the CBOM belongs in phase one
The goal of the Locate phase, in ASD’s words, is “to discover and document where organisations use traditional asymmetric cryptography”. The guidance asks organisations to consider every part of the IT environment, including cloud services, applications, hardware and operational technology, any of which could rely on traditional asymmetric cryptography for digital signatures, authentication flows or encryption of data in transit.
ASD names the cryptographic bill of materials (CBOM) as an effective method for creating that inventory at environment and system levels, and describes it at two levels of maturity. A mature CBOM details cryptographic implementations in the context they are used, capturing products, software, libraries, algorithms, protocols, parameters, versions and configurations. An initial, high-level CBOM can be much simpler: a list of critical systems and components mapped to the critical security functions they rely on cryptography to perform.
That second point is practical and easy to overlook. A national agency is saying, in effect, that a first inventory does not need to be complete to be useful, provided it starts from the systems that matter most.
Assess and Triage: value first, then priority
LATICE separates two questions that plans often run together. Assess asks what is at stake: the value and sensitivity of systems that use traditional asymmetric cryptography, and the impact a compromise of integrity or confidentiality would have on business operations, “including any regulatory or legal implications”.
Triage then turns that into an order of work, weighing the risk from a CRQC and the relative priority of transition for each system. ASD lists factors that may shape an individual system’s priority, including whether the system:
- handles sensitive or classified data
- interacts with external organisations
- is expected to easily transition
- implements standards for legacy interoperability
- is bespoke or commodity
- has relevant non-cryptographic protections that apply
- follows a specific lifecycle and refresh cadence.
The last factor deserves attention. A system already due for replacement may be better handled through procurement than through remediation, and triage is where that decision gets made.
Implement: do not rush ahead of the standards
ASD expects much of the implementation work to look familiar: patching existing applications, hardware and operational technology; changing software libraries according to vendor guidance; and undertaking new procurement to replace old system components. The work can be delivered by new or existing service providers, or in-house.
The most important sentence in this phase is a caution: “It is crucial that organisations do not rush ahead of standardised and verified implementations.” Organisations upgrading bespoke systems in-house should use standardised and reputable software libraries, and the same applies to libraries adopted from service providers and vendors.
Two positions in the guidance are worth knowing before any architecture decision. On hybrid schemes, ASD “does not recommend, but does not prohibit” post-quantum/traditional (PQ/T) hybrids. It notes that a CRQC would render the traditional elements obsolete, so all organisations should expect to move to purely post-quantum algorithms in future. On quantum key distribution (QKD), ASD says practical limitations, including specialised hardware and concerns around availability and native authentication, mean it does not support QKD for secure communications.
Communicate and educate: easy to underestimate
The final phase positions the organisation to deploy post-quantum algorithms and sustain them into the future. ASD’s ideal is a transition that is transparent to most stakeholders. The areas affected most directly are those that manage deployment or security for systems using traditional asymmetric cryptography, while others may notice subtler effects, such as mild increases in data sizes and in the computation post-quantum algorithms need.
Giving communication a phase of its own is a useful signal, and vendors sit at the start of it. Much of the cryptography in a typical estate arrives inside products the organisation did not build, so the transition depends on suppliers as much as on internal teams.
How LATICE maps to the ECEM lifecycle
Enterprise Cryptographic Exposure Management (ECEM) describes the same journey as a continuous six-stage lifecycle: Discover, Inventory, Assess, Prioritise, Transition, Monitor. The two line up closely:
- Locate corresponds to Discover and Inventory. ASD’s Locate phase covers both finding cryptography and documenting it in a CBOM.
- Assess corresponds to Assess: value, sensitivity and business impact.
- Triage corresponds to Prioritise: deciding the order of transition.
- Implement corresponds to Transition: moving systems to post-quantum algorithms.
- ASD’s post-2030 monitoring milestone corresponds to Monitor.
- Communicate and educate has no single ECEM stage. It runs across the whole programme.
The main structural difference is where monitoring sits. In ASD’s guidance it appears as a milestone after 2030; in ECEM it is a stage of its own, because an inventory starts to go out of date as soon as it is finished. New applications, renewed certificates and vendor updates all change the picture, and a transition plan is only as sound as the inventory it reads from.
What to check before the end of 2026
For organisations that follow ASD guidance, or simply want a well-structured plan, the practical test for the coming months is whether ASD’s first milestone can be met with evidence rather than estimates:
- Is there a first CBOM, even a simple one, mapping critical systems to the cryptographic functions they rely on?
- Has the value and sensitivity of the data those systems protect been assessed, including regulatory and legal impact?
- Is there a triage order that reflects data sensitivity and lifespan, external exposure and refresh cycles?
- Have vendors been asked about their post-quantum plans?
- Does the plan include contingency for internal delays, as ASD recommends?
If the answer to the first question is no, that is the place to start. Every later phase of LATICE, and every later stage of ECEM, reads from it.
Source: Australian Signals Directorate, Planning for post-quantum cryptography (first published July 2022, last updated September 2025).
Further reading: what Enterprise Cryptographic Exposure Management is, why post-quantum deadlines are really inventory deadlines, and our approach to PQC migration planning.