Chetan Agrawal, Arka Nayan and Erik Engstrom describe the redesign as addressing two requirements at once: data sovereignty rules that confine plaintext processing to a region, and harvest-now, decrypt-later attacks in which traffic captured today is decrypted once a quantum computer exists. GeoKey Manager first shipped in 2017 for TLS keys and moved to ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption in 2022. Cloudflare gives two reasons for dropping that scheme: no production-ready post-quantum variant exists, and customers don't need the large number of regions it was built to express.
In its place, key protection uses HPKE, the hybrid public-key encryption construction defined in RFC 9180, with a key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) combining ML-KEM-768 and X25519, HKDF-SHA-256 and AES-256-GCM. Two kinds of keys replace the policy expressions. Regional root keys are 256-bit symmetric secrets held one per region.
Application-specific key pairs are derived from a root for a single service, such as Tunnel or Gateway, and a single epoch, Cloudflare's term for a key generation that rotation advances. The key-management service derives the application key pair and wraps customer private keys under its public component.
