Celebrating the Quantum

Vlastimil Člupek, Lukáš Malina, Václav Zeman

This article introduces a solution of secure digital archiving in the post-quantum era. The basic tool at secure digital archiving of the electronic documents is the signature schemes, which are used at creation of the certificates and the timestamps. This article deals with the question of security of the signature schemes in the post-quantum era and introduces the post-quantum signature schemes, which will be resistant to the attacks leading by both conventional and quantum computers. The conventional signature schemes, based on factorization or discrete logarithm problem, in case of implementing the Shor algorithm on a quantum computer will be easy to break through. The main point of this article is the proposal of the solution of secure digital archiving with using the secure post-quantum signature schemes.

William M. Honig

Syed Muntasir Mamun

These interview talking points open on the locks-versus-the-archive fallacy: treating post-quantum cryptography as a software migration does not protect historically stolen data. They state that harvest-now-decrypt-later is already underway, with encrypted enterprise archives being hoarded pending a later break of current encryption, and that security has to move from perimeter defence to data-level resilience so the archive can survive independently of who holds the transient keys. They then describe data-centre speciation into three forms: silicon compute (hot, GPU-dense infrastructure for real-time AI), molecular halls (DNA or synthetic-polymer archives for permanent, zero-power retention), and sovereign caches (geopolitically bound, physically air-gapped, jurisdictionally hardened local vaults). Interview talking points by Dr. Syed Muntasir Mamun, ORCID 0000-0001-6845-2853.

George S. Greenstein

Carl S. Helrich