Tink Roadmap

  • Tink is being split into multiple GitHub repositories by language to allow for decoupled releases and more frequent updates.

  • Tink documentation is being improved and consolidated with updated examples and addressed gaps.

  • Keyset and registry are undergoing a redesign to enhance key management and support importing/exporting keys in various formats.

  • Monitoring support has been added, enabling users to collect data on cryptographic operations for key rotation and security analysis.

  • Tink is actively integrating post-quantum cryptography algorithms and provides experimental access to some PQC algorithms in C++.

(Last updated October 2025)

This page details the high-level goals of the Tink team. It will be periodically updated as the goals are achieved or changed.

Keyset and registry redesign

We want to give users a better way to manage keys within a keyset. This will make it easier to implement key management systems and will enable more comprehensive support for importing and exporting keys to different formats like PEM or JWK (while ensuring the API prevents common mistakes that could result in security vulnerabilities). This work is mostly complete for Java, C++, and Go.

We are also working on allowing multiple key generation and primitive configurations in Tink, which will eventually replace the current registries. This will make it easier to develop libraries based on Tink and will also allow for the seamless removal and deprecation of insecure algorithms. This work is ongoing for C++ and Java.

Post-quantum cryptography (PQC)

We are continuing to add support for the NIST-selected PQC algorithms. ML-DSA and SLH-DSA are now both supported in C++ and Go using the respective digital signature APIs for those languages. Java support for both PQC algorithms is in progress. Support for Kyber/ML-KEM with a new key encapsulation mechanism (KEM) API is also under development.

Performance

We intend to fine-tune our Tink performance measurements and provide appropriate performance benchmarks for our users. We are also continuing to investigate possible performance enhancements to Tink.

Tell us what you think!

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