A plain-language look at why quantum-secure encryption matters now, and what Five Angstrom actually delivers.
Quantum-secure encryption is designed using mathematical problems that stay hard even for quantum machines — so data protected today stays protected years from now, not just against today's attacks.
Almost all encryption in use today relies on math problems — like factoring very large numbers — that are practically impossible for ordinary computers to solve. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer, using fundamentally different methods, could solve those same problems far faster, making today's encryption breakable.
Quantum computers capable of this don't exist yet at the scale needed. But encrypted data can be intercepted and stored now, and decrypted later once the technology catches up — a pattern often called "harvest now, decrypt later." For records that need to stay confidential for years (student data, medical records, institutional data), that future risk is a present-day design problem.
Instead of relying on math problems that quantum computers are good at solving, quantum-secure (or "post-quantum") encryption is built on different mathematical problems — ones that stay hard even for quantum machines. The data is still encrypted and decrypted the same way from a user's point of view; what changes is the underlying mathematics protecting it.
Five Angstrom designs and implements quantum-secure encryption for partner platforms handling sensitive institutional data — evaluating where a system is exposed, and building in encryption methods designed to hold up against both current and future attack methods.
The technical picture behind the plain-language summary above.
Shor’s algorithm breaks RSA, finite-field Diffie–Hellman and elliptic-curve cryptography on a large fault-tolerant quantum computer. Recorded traffic is exposed if its required confidentiality lifetime plus your migration time exceeds the time until such a machine exists (Mosca’s inequality: X + Y > Z).
Grover’s algorithm only halves effective symmetric strength, so AES-256 and SHA-384 or stronger give a sufficient margin.
ML-KEM (FIPS 203) for key establishment, ML-DSA (FIPS 204) and SLH-DSA (FIPS 205) for signatures, published in August 2024. Hybrid key exchange combining X25519 with ML-KEM-768 is already default in major browsers and CDNs.
Keys and signatures are larger — an ML-KEM-768 public key is 1,184 bytes versus 32 for X25519 — so we measure handshake size, latency and compatibility on your real workloads.
We build a cryptographic bill of materials for your platform, estimate the confidentiality lifetime of each data class to rank exposure, and refactor so algorithms are configuration, not code.
We pilot hybrid key exchange on the highest-risk channels first, plan the signature and certificate transition separately, and verify against published known-answer test vectors and interoperability tests.
Let's look at where your platform is exposed, and what a quantum-secure migration path would actually involve.
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