Dr. Pravir Malik is the founder and technologist of QIQuantum and the Forbes Technology Council Community leader for Quantum Computing.
For decades, cybersecurity has been built around one deceptively simple idea: Protect the secret string.
That string may be a password, private key, seed phrase, token, certificate authority value or hardware-protected credential. The architecture changes, the vault improves, the algorithm evolves, but the root assumption usually remains the same. Somewhere inside the system is a privileged sequence of bits. If the right party possesses it, trust is granted. If the wrong party obtains it, trust collapses.
The quantum-cyber era exposes the weakness in that category of trust. A string, however well protected, is still a transcript. It can be copied, replayed, leaked, modeled or eventually extracted. Post-quantum cryptography is essential, but it does not by itself solve the deeper problem: What kind of root should those new algorithms depend on?
Post-Quantum Is Necessary, But Not Sufficient
