How 1Password advanced its post-quantum cryptographic journey using AWS

Organizations that are undertaking PQ migrations face challenges beyond simply adopting new algorithms. Evolving cryptographic standards require companies to update libraries, test implementations, and maintain compatibility through multiple upgrades over time. For 1Password, the stakes are particularly high because its vaults contain credentials and digital identities that need to remain confidential for decades.

To advance its PQ migration without repeatedly rebuilding and validating its cryptography, the company needed to update its cryptographic stack while maintaining compatibility and reliable performance. 1Password also wanted to efficiently and consistently demonstrate the quality and compliance of its data protection to customers and regulators.

“For us, this was about cryptographic agility, not a onetime key rotation or migration to a new library,” says Daryl Martin, engineering manager at 1Password. “We wanted to build and rearchitect our cryptography to include PQ.” So the identity-security company turned to AWS.

1Password focused first on internet traffic, which is exposed to harvest-now, decrypt-later threats. The team used managed AWS services where possible and the open source AWS Libcrypto (AWS-LC) library for all other scenarios. The general-purpose cryptographic library includes formally verified, high performance implementations of PQ algorithms. It has received Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) 140-3 validation and is compatible with OpenSSL for easy replacement. 1Password outlines its broader approach in its PQ cryptography overview.

For client-side TLS, the company migrated from a collection of cryptographic libraries, including Ring and other crates in its Rust stack, to aws-lc-rs. AWS worked alongside the Rustls open source community to integrate PQ, making it easier for customers like 1Password to benefit from AWS cryptographic investments in their existing TLS stack.

On the server side, the company upgraded from TLS 1.2 to TLS 1.3 and migrated from OpenSSL to AWS-LC. 1Password trusts AWS-LC because AWS relies on the library to simplify and de-risk cryptographic evolution across managed services and infrastructure. The company also updated its configuration for Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), which distributes network traffic to improve application scalability.

Within ELB, the company used Application Load Balancer (ALB) to load balance HTTP and HTTPS traffic with advanced request routing targeted at the delivery of modern applications. Specifically, 1Password selected a TLS policy with PQ support on its endpoints, which are backed by ALB. This policy prefers hybrid key exchange mechanisms that use the Module-Lattice-Based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism (ML-KEM). This configuration update required no cryptographic code changes.

For global distributions that are backed by Amazon CloudFront, a service for securely delivering content with low latency and high transfer speeds, 1Password didn’t even incur reconfiguration work. AWS automatically upgraded Amazon CloudFront distributions to support hybrid PQ key exchange.

1Password completed its server-side migration to hybrid PQ key exchange within 3 months while updating its client-side cryptographic foundation. The company validated changes with staggered server-side rollouts and soak testing across different client hardware and operating systems before proceeding more broadly, observing no performance regressions. Customers saw no impact on latency or performance after the migration.

Under the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, 1Password can now adapt to evolving security requirements, including future transitions to PQ certificates and PQ authentication with the Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Algorithm (ML-DSA). Building on AWS-LC, a co-op student was able to complete most of that work, including support for ML-DSA passkeys, without needing to determine which Rust crate to use.

“Using AWS, we deployed our post-quantum protection without any cryptographic code changes,” says Martin. “That’s cryptographic agility at work.”