AIBRIEF
SystemRescue 13.02, a Linux rescue toolkit for fixing broken or compromised machines, ships with age 1.3.1, an offline file encryption tool that pairs a classical scheme with ML KEM 768, a post quantum standard NIST finalized as FIPS 203 in 2024.
SystemRescue 13.02, a small Linux rescue distribution of the kind a sysadmin boots from a USB stick to recover a broken or compromised machine, shipped on August 1, 2026 (techtimes; changelog). The release's distinguishing addition is age 1.3.1, an offline file-encryption utility that uses a hybrid post-quantum construction: classical X25519 combined with ML-KEM-768, the lattice-based key-encapsulation standard NIST finalized as FIPS 203 in August 2024 (age repo). age is maintained by Filippo Valsorda and Ben Cartwright-Cox.
Recovery tooling is one of the few places where the "harvest now, decrypt later" threat meets long-lived secrets directly. Incident responders handle credential archives, encryption keys, disk images, and configuration backups whose confidentiality has to hold for years, not days. An offline-capable, networkless install path matters because the rescue environment is the untrusted machine and the toolkit medium is removable (download).
SystemRescue 13.02 also advances the kernel to Linux 6.18.41 and ships bcachefs 1.38.8, the first release after the filesystem shed its "experimental" designation earlier in summer 2026. PQC has now moved from the wire to the recovery disk.