MICKAI
Mickai Ebook · 18 pages · 19 June 2026

Signing for 2035

The post-quantum record that outlives the algorithm, and why crypto-agility, not a single scheme, is the only honest migration.

By , Founder and named inventor, Mickai LTD · Crunchbase · LinkedIn · GitHub
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Inside this ebook

I have spent the last few years building a system whose entire promise is that a record made today can still be trusted decades from now. That is a strange thing to promise in cryptography, because the one constant of the field is that schemes break. RSA was sound until factoring got cheaper. Elliptic curves were elegant until we learned what a sufficiently large quantum computer would do to them. So when I tell you the Mickai SIOS seals every consequential action into a post-quantum Open Audit Record, the honest follow-up question is not which algorithm did you choose, it is what happens when

Part I · The Problem
1. The shelf life of trust
2. Harvest now, decrypt later
3. The myth of the final algorithm
Part II · The Floor
4. Reading FIPS 204 honestly
5. The cost of the lattice
6. Belief, not proof
Part III · The Agility
7. Crypto-agility as a property of records
8. The record that carries its own history
9. Rotation without repudiation
Part IV · The Practice
10. Designing the Open Audit Record to last
11. Migrating without breaking the past
12. The honest migration
Frequently asked questions

Why a signature you trust today is a liability you inherit tomorrow?

Most discussions of cryptography quietly assume that the moment of signing and the moment of verification are close together. You sign a transaction, it clears, the matter is settled. Under that assumption the only thing that matters is whether the scheme is sound right now, and right now RSA and elliptic curves are still doing useful work. But the records I care about are not like that. A sovereign audit record, a deed of assignment, a chain of custody for evidence, a medica

What ML-DSA-65 actually buys you, and exactly where it stops?

FIPS 204 is the standard that specifies ML-DSA, the Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Algorithm, the standardised form of what the research community knew as CRYSTALS-Dilithium. It is a digital signature scheme, which means it does one job, it lets the holder of a private key produce a signature that anyone holding the matching public key can verify, with security believed to hold against both classical and quantum adversaries. ML-DSA-65 is the middle parameter set, size

How a record carries its own algorithm history and survives the schemes it was signed with?

Crypto-agility is usually described as a property of systems, the ability to swap one algorithm for another without rewriting everything around it. That is necessary but it is not sufficient, and the insufficiency is exactly where long-lived records get hurt. A system can be perfectly agile going forward, happily signing new records with a new scheme, while every record it already produced stays stranded under the old one. Forward agility protects tomorrow's records. It does

Cite this work
Irons, M. (2026). Signing for 2035. Mickai LTD. https://mickai.co.uk/ebooks/signing-for-2035-the-post-quantum-record.
About the author

Micky Irons

Founder of Mickai LTD (Companies House 17166618, England and Wales). Named inventor on the Mickai SIOS patent corpus, recorded on the UK Intellectual Property Office public register at numbers GB2607309.8 to GB2611702.8. Trade mark Mickai registered at UK00004373277 (classes 9 and 42, filed 15 April 2026). Before founding Mickai, Micky was a Sellafield site worker, and the egress constraint observed from inside the regulated workstation is the engineering origin of the substrate.

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