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Spork v0.2.0-alpha: First Public Release

January 9, 2026 Release Spork

We are excited to announce the public alpha release of Spork — a pure-Rust, post-quantum Certificate Authority. This release represents months of development and testing, and we believe it is ready for evaluation by the security and PKI community.

What is Spork?

Spork is a Certificate Authority (CA) built from the ground up in Rust with post-quantum cryptography as a first-class feature. Unlike traditional CAs that bolt on PQC support as an afterthought, Spork was designed to support ML-DSA (FIPS 204) and SLH-DSA (FIPS 205) signatures natively.

What's in v0.2.0-alpha

This alpha release includes:

  • CA Hierarchy — Full Root and Issuing CA support with proper chain validation
  • ML-DSA-65 and ML-DSA-87 — Post-quantum signatures per FIPS 204
  • SLH-DSA — Stateless hash-based signatures per FIPS 205
  • Classical Algorithms — ECDSA (P-256, P-384) and RSA (2048, 4096) for compatibility
  • ACME Server — Certbot-compatible automatic certificate enrollment
  • EST Server — RFC 7030 enrollment over secure transport
  • SCEP Server — Legacy device enrollment support
  • OCSP Responder — Online certificate status checking
  • CRL Generation — Full and delta CRL support
  • Interactive Shell — spork-shell repl for CA management

Why Rust?

Certificate Authorities are security-critical infrastructure. Memory safety bugs in CA software have historically led to serious vulnerabilities. By building Spork in pure Rust with no OpenSSL dependency, we eliminate entire classes of vulnerabilities while keeping minimal vendored C (SQLite, TLS) isolated.

The cryptographic primitives come from the RustCrypto project — well-audited, pure-Rust implementations of ML-DSA, SLH-DSA, and classical algorithms.

Quick Start

Downloads are not yet publicly available. Check the Spork page for updates.

Licensing

Spork is licensed under BSL 1.1 (Business Source License). Evaluation and testing is free with no time limit. Production deployments require a commercial license.

Contact licensing@quantumnexum.com for production licensing inquiries.

Known Limitations

This is an alpha release. Known limitations include:

  • Web UI is partial — CLI is the primary interface
  • HSM integration is partial — SoftHSM works, hardware HSMs need testing
  • Linux x86_64 only — macOS and Windows builds are planned based on demand
  • Not yet security audited — third-party audit planned for v1.0

Feedback

We want your feedback! Please report bugs, feature requests, or security issues:

Spork

A pure-Rust, post-quantum Certificate Authority. Downloads coming soon.

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Per Fidem Continuamus — Through trust, we continue.