Harvest Now. Decrypt Later.

Pillar 01 · Security

Right now, somewhere with good air conditioning and a generous storage budget, encrypted traffic is being copied wholesale and filed away by people who cannot read a byte of it. Yet.

That's the entire strategy, and it's a patient one. They don't need to break your encryption today. They need to keep the ciphertext until the hardware that breaks it arrives. The decrypt date is in the future. The harvest date is now, and has been for years — which means the data you encrypted in 2019 is already sitting in someone's archive, waiting for the math to catch up.

The math is catching up. RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography — the things guarding most of the internet, including, almost certainly, yours — don't degrade gracefully against a quantum computer. They fall to Shor's algorithm all at once. A lock doesn't get progressively easier to pick and then one day open; one day someone simply has the key. The only open variable is when the machine ships, and "never" stopped being a credible answer some time ago.

So the question for anything you encrypt with classical crypto today is not "is this secure?" Today, sure. The question is: how long does this need to stay secret, and will the algorithm survive that long?

If your answer is twenty-five years — health records, sealed legal files, defence material, IP, anything with a long confidentiality tail — then the honest answer is no. It will be decrypted. Not maybe. On a timeline, by someone who already has the file.

Every vendor will wave a post-quantum "roadmap" at you. Sit with that word. A roadmap is a written confession that you are not protected now. It is a promise to protect you at some future date, authored by an organisation whose own ciphertext is being harvested on the same clock as yours. The roadmap doesn't defend your data. It schedules a meeting about defending your data.

CloudRAID encrypts with ML-KEM-1024 — lattice-based key encapsulation, the NIST standard, aligned to NSA's CNSA 2.0 suite. In the data path. Not on a slide titled "Future Initiatives," not behind a "general availability coming soon." In the bytes. The traffic harvested from us this morning decrypts to nothing this morning, and to nothing the morning the quantum computer is finally switched on.

There is no migration project. No Q3 line item. No steering committee with a charter and a colour palette.

The data we wrote today is already safe from a computer that doesn't exist yet.

Everyone else is running a race against a clock that started without telling them, and reading their roadmap to find out how far behind they are.