& THE USE OF firmware agents—including their use to define the functionality of embedded cores—has proliferated on computer systems of all scales, especially servers. The agents are often not visible to the operating system as they independently perform configuration, monitoring, and certain control tasks. For example, the baseboard management controller (BMC) on server platforms runs a firmware stack (e.g., OpenBMC (https://github.com/openbmc/ openbmc)), has a network port, some peripherals on external buses (e.g., I2 C’s, SPI, etc.), and storage. The BMC is effectively another full (but scaled-down) computing system on the server of which it is a component. While the BMC can directly affect the operation of a server (e.g., by controlling its power states), it does not interact with the OS. Its behavior is defined completely by its firmware. Improvements in silicon manufacturing processes have reduced the size of these cores to the point where they can be physically embedded within silicon dies of the system components (such as a CPU) on which they operate. In parallel, the volume and importance of their responsibilities have increased, beginning with power management and escalating to security operations that can affect functional safety. Given this, it is critical that they run only signed and authenticated code. One of today’s best practices to authenticate the firmware that runs embedded cores is public key cryptography (digital signatures), which relies on FIPS-140 digital signature algorithms such as RSA and EC-DSA. However, quantum computing will render these algorithms useless since factorizing integers and solving the discrete logarithm problem (i.e., the underlying security problems of RSA and EC-DSA) will be solvable in polynomial time. This implies that increasing RSA/ECC key sizes will be insufficient to defeat a quantum adversary. Prof. Michele Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MM.2019.2920203