2026 is shaping up to be the year digital trust gets faster, smarter, and impossible to ignore.
If 2025 proved anything, it’s that trust is no longer a box you check once – it’s something you validate continuously. This past year brought major milestones, rising urgency around quantum readiness, and a renewed focus on cryptographic resilience. One of the biggest shifts came with the CA/Browser Forum’s unanimous decision to accelerate TLS certificate lifecycles. The staged transition – from today’s 398-day maximum to just 47 days by 2029 – begins in March 2026.
This past year showed us that quantum is no longer theoretical. Regulators expect action, adversaries are harvesting data, and organizations are discovering just how complex and interconnected their cryptographic environments really are. Establishing digital trust – verifying every device, workload, AI system, and user – is becoming the only way to operate with speed instead of risk. Keyfactor has been helping enterprises take that step. In 2025, it became clear to many that delaying doesn’t reduce uncertainty; it only increases exposure.
And this year brought another milestone: ABI Research ranked Keyfactor the #1 enterprise PKI vendor, citing leadership in automation, crypto-agility, IoT identity, and post-quantum readiness. Analysts underscored the challenges in enterprise security: soaring certificate volumes, shrinking lifespans, limited visibility, and the race toward quantum-safe cryptography.
With that momentum behind us, we turn to the year ahead.
Here are the top trends Keyfactor experts predict in 2026 – and steps you can take to stay ahead and improve your security posture.
Prediction 1
Quantum: Biggest Reality Check in a Generation
Insights from Chris Hickman, Chief Security Officer, Keyfactor
The gap between awareness and readiness for quantum risk will become impossible to ignore. In 2026, quantum doesn’t break digital trust – it exposes how fragile today’s cryptographic foundations already are.
Nearly half of enterprises are unprepared for the quantum cybersecurity threat – and only 42% are actively addressing it today. This shows that most organizations still believe they have time, but they don’t have visibility into what they’re protecting, or what’s already vulnerable.
Hickman anticipates seeing more vendors release products with post-quantum capabilities built in. This will begin to separate the organizations that have been paying attention to quantum preparedness from those that are still waiting – or worse, unaware.
“You have to be driving the bus here, not riding it,” Hickman notes.
The window for a safe, cost-efficient transition is closing faster than most realize. In 2026, organizations should begin mapping and inventorying all cryptographic assets and dependencies. Hickman cites a Keyfactor study showing that lack of skilled personnel (40%), competing priorities (40%), and unclear industry standards (39%) are already slowing progress – and those that delay will face greater cost, risk, and pressure once migration becomes mandatory.
Forward-leaning enterprises have already accepted that the technology is here. They’re shifting from developing algorithms and building technology stacks to meeting compliance requirements and strengthening cybersecurity resilience with crypto-agility best practices.
“The organizations that embrace this shift will be best positioned to navigate the quantum era with confidence,” he adds.
Here’s how to stay ahead:
- Build a unified inventory of cryptographic assets, algorithms, and dependencies.
- Prioritize long-lived systems that will be hardest to update later.
- Establish crypto-agile processes that support rapid algorithm transitions.
- Assign ownership and build a realistic roadmap before migration becomes mandatory.
Recommended resource: Digital Trust Digest: The Quantum-Readiness Edition
Prediction 2
Automation: Dividing Line Between Resilience and Outages
Insights from Tomas Gustavsson, Chief PKI Officer, Keyfactor
Shrinking certificate lifespans will push many organizations into a new era of operational pressure, says Gustavsson. With public TLS validity dropping to 200 days in March 2026 – and ultimately toward 47 days – manual renewal processes will become unsustainable.
Gustavsson highlights data showing just how strained teams already are:
- 1 in 10 organizations experiences a certificate-related outage every week.
- Just 17% have real-time visibility across their certificate landscape.
Without automation, IT teams will be overwhelmed by the manual effort required to renew and track thousands of certificates, a cycle that increases both workload and risk. Every visibility gap raises the odds of an outage. And as organizations lean further into automation, we expect they’ll also shorten the lifespans of privately trusted certificates, making full automation essential across the entire environment – not just public ones.
“By 2029, when digital certificates operate with 47-day lifespans, the operational load from these shorter lifespans will surge 10x higher than today. Even by March 15, 2026, when certificate lifespans are cut to 200 days from their current 398-day lifespan, we’ll start to see mounting strain on teams as manual processes and fragmented ownership models begin to break down and workload tied to certificate management rises fivefold,” he says.
Outages, mis-issuance, and compliance failures will become daily risks for teams that haven’t automated. Yet within that pressure lies opportunity. Organizations that embrace end-to-end certificate lifecycle automation, from discovery to renewal, will transform what was once a maintenance burden into a strategic advantage.
“In 2026, the question won’t be how long your certificates last; it will be how fast your organization can adapt, respond, and renew. In a 47-day, post-quantum world, trust isn’t permanent. It’s proven, over and over again,” says Gustavsson.
Here’s how to stay ahead:
- Automate discovery, issuance, renewal, and revocation across all certificates.
- Centralize governance to eliminate ownership gaps and blind spots.
- Begin shortening private certificate lifespans in alignment with maturing automation.
- Model outage risk and quantify the operational savings of lifecycle automation.
Recommended resource: Digital Trust Digest: The Automation Edition
Prediction 3
AI Will Need a Digital Identity – Or It Will Become a New Attack Surface
Insights from Ellen Boehm, SVP, IoT & AI Identity Innovation, Keyfactor
You can’t secure what you can’t identify, especially AI.
“As we move into 2026, AI will no longer just assist; it will act. Agentic systems will make decisions, initiate transactions, and connect directly to sensitive data and infrastructure. Each of these AI agents now represents a new kind of identity that must be authenticated, managed, and trusted. Without verifiable digital identity, we lose visibility into who or what is acting within our systems,” explains Boehm.
She foresees 2026 as the year AI shifts from assisting to acting. Agentic AI systems will initiate transactions, access sensitive data, and interact autonomously with critical infrastructure. Each AI agent becomes a new machine identity — one that must be authenticated and monitored.
Boehm warns that many organizations are repeating mistakes made during the rise of IoT: shipping innovation quickly while deferring basic security controls. Granting broad access to AI without verifiable identity or governance is equivalent to “handing over the keys to your network without knowing who’s driving.”
Trustworthy AI requires cryptographic identity, enforced through certificates, mTLS, and strict governance of what each agent can do.
“In 2026, enterprises will realize that securing AI isn’t just about protecting data; it’s about establishing trust in the machines themselves. As agentic AI proliferates, every AI agent must have its own cryptographic identity, enforced through certificates and mutual TLS. The organizations that lead in 2026 will be those that build identity into the DNA of AI, creating systems that are not only intelligent, but inherently trustworthy.”
Here’s how to stay ahead:
- Assign certificates and cryptographic identities to AI agents and workloads.
- Enforce mTLS for all AI-to-system and AI-to-AI communication.
- Apply least-privilege policies and strong identity governance to AI components.
- Monitor AI identities continuously and rotate certificates frequently.
Recommended resource: Securing Agentic AI with Zero Trust
Prediction 4
AI Will Collide with Compliance
Insights from Ted Shorter, Chief Technology Officer, Keyfactor
2026 will be the year AI systems run head-first into regulatory scrutiny, expects Shorter.
“What’s been acceptable in pilots and proofs-of-concept won’t stand up to real audit standards. As AI systems move into production, most organizations will discover their controls and governance haven’t kept pace with the technology itself,” he notes.
Auditors will start asking hard questions and businesses will need real answers.
Shorter predicts that auditors will seek clarity on questions many organizations cannot yet answer:
- Who owns the outputs of AI systems?
- How are models validated and updated?
- What audit trails exist when a model makes a wrong or harmful decision?
- How do organizations guarantee model integrity and prevent tampering?
Enterprises will be pushed to treat AI like any other critical system: monitored, controlled, governed, and provable.
Here’s how to stay ahead:
- Implement chain-of-custody controls for model data, training inputs, and updates.
- Enforce signing and provenance tracking for model verification.
- Apply consistent governance, access controls, and logging frameworks.
- Document decisions and validation cycles to anticipate audit requirements.
Recommended resource: Building Secure AI Agents from Day One: A Readiness Checklist for Ethics, Policy, and Trust Leads
Prediction 5
CRA Will Reset the Standard for Connected Device Trust
Insights from Guillaume Crinon, Director, IoT Business Strategy, Keyfactor
Crinon emphasizes that the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) will move from “future concern” to immediate obligation in 2026.
Even U.S.-based companies selling connected devices to the EU must comply – or face hefty fines. Requirements will start on September 11, 2026, while most other provisions of the CRA will fully apply on December 11, 2027.
Here’s an excerpt from the EU’s legislation:
“Requirements will also ensure that cybersecurity is taken into account throughout supply chains, making final products with digital elements and their components more secure…[and] applies to such products as smart home products with security functionalities, including smart door locks, baby monitoring systems and alarm systems, connected toys and personal wearable health technology.”
Pro tip: Considering that an electronic product takes between 14 to 20 months from ideation to market introduction, every product you develop must anticipate compliance.
Crinon warns there isn’t any magic universal recipe to comply with the CRA. However, he recommends some technologies that will make it possible to fix any product securely – and remotely, if applicable:
- Selecting secure processors, secure elements as a device root-of-trust
- Dimensioning memory to anticipate for later updates, upgrades and fixes
- Implementing a secure boot and secure firmware update mechanism
- Implementing a proper firmware and software signing infrastructure to secure the usage of signing keys and protecting them with a policy which is enforceable
- Deploying a PKI to issue certificates for back-end servers, firmware signing keys and device identities if applicable
- Securing manufacturing and device personalization steps especially if outsourced to contract manufacturers
- Deploying a tool to maintain your SBOM – Software Bill of Material – to best track vulnerabilities, document dependencies and assess how they affect your product
“CRA isn’t only about the design of devices but also the processes behind design, development, manufacturing, and testing, which will need to be assessed and documented. For many customers, this will mean a substantial upgrade in the way they develop and manufacture, and I can only encourage them to address these topics one at a time as soon as they can,” Crinon adds.
Here’s how to stay ahead:
- Select secure processors or secure elements as hardware roots of trust.
- Implement secure boot and authenticated firmware update mechanisms.
- Protect firmware signing keys using strong PKI-backed policies.
- Mature SBOM practices to track vulnerabilities and dependencies.
- Secure manufacturing and personalization workflows, especially with outsourcing.
Recommended resource: Built for Trust: Navigating the EU Cyber Resilience Act
Digital Trust in 2026: Adaptive, Living, and Built by Design
Quantum acceleration, shrinking certificate lifespans, AI autonomy, and tightening device regulations are converging into a pivotal moment for digital trust. The organizations that move now – mapping cryptographic assets, embracing automation, securing AI identities, and preparing for new regulatory frameworks – will lead 2026 with confidence.
Digital trust isn’t permanent. It’s proven continuously. And 2026 will reward the organizations ready to prove it.
Keyfactor is the leader in digital trust and quantum-safe security. We can help you protect every device, workload, AI agent, and connected “thing” with modern PKI, certificate automation, and cryptographic inventory. Our team is ready to answer your questions and help you stay ahead in 2026 and beyond.
