ANSSI-FR/MLA

MLA (Multi Layer Archive) is a project from ANSSI (the French National Cybersecurity Agency), which lends it significant institutional credibility and technical pedigree. Its primary moat is the focus on Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) within a memory-safe Rust implementation, positioning it as a 'future-proof' alternative to legacy formats like ZIP or TAR. With 368 stars and a very low velocity over 5 years, it is clearly a niche security tool rather than a mass-market utility. The project faces a massive adoption hurdle; archive formats suffer from extreme network effects where compatibility is king. While it is technically superior in security posture to standard formats, it competes with established modern tools like 'age' for encryption and 'Zstd' for compression. The 'multi-layer' approach allows for flexible metadata handling and integrity checks, but without a major push for standardized usage in government or defense sectors, it remains a high-quality reference implementation rather than a market leader. Frontier labs are unlikely to compete here as file archiving is a solved commodity problem for their core business, though they may eventually adopt the underlying PQC primitives used here.