DPDK Summit 2026

Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) requires seamless integration into modern packet frameworks. This work introduces post-quantum cryptography (PQC) support in the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) through the OpenSSL Poll Mode Driver (PMD), providing developers with a practical entry point to experiment with PQC primitives using the familiar cryptodev API. The OpenSSL PMD implementation serves as a reference design, demonstrating how PQC algorithms such as key encapsulation and digital signatures can be exposed consistently to applications with minimal changes. For developers, this enables immediate validation, benchmarking, and integration of PQC workloads in software, while establishing a clear API model for future extensions. The long-term vision is for hardware crypto accelerators—including Octeon CNXK and VirtIO crypto drivers—to adopt this reference approach, ensuring interoperability and contributing back to the community. By aligning software and hardware PMDs around a unified PQC API, DPDK fosters a collaborative ecosystem where developers, vendors, and operators can build scalable, quantum resilient applications such as VPNs, TLS termination, IPsec gateways, and 5G cores.