**I Oversee a Lab Where Engineers Try to Destroy My Life's Work. It's the Only Way to Prepare for Quantum Threats**

As I walk through our state-of-the-art lab, I'm reminded of a pivotal moment in my career that left an indelible mark on me. It was back in the early 1990s when I first encountered the harsh reality of security breaches. As a young engineer starting an internship at one of the companies behind the smart card industry, I had naively assumed that my credit card was secure. That assumption was shattered when our security team compromised my PIN in under 10 minutes. This jarring experience not only humbled me but also instilled within me a deep understanding of the vulnerabilities that lurk beneath the surface of even the most seemingly impenetrable systems.

Since then, I've dedicated myself to ensuring that my life's work – designing secure hardware for various industries – is rigorously tested against the very threats it seeks to prevent. In our labs, engineers are intentionally tasked with breaking down security measures, simulating attacks on chips, and analyzing their weaknesses under controlled conditions. This seemingly counterintuitive approach may raise eyebrows at first glance, but its logic is straightforward: Trust that has never been tested is merely an assumption – and assumptions often fail catastrophically when least expected.

Over the past three decades, our work has evolved to address a new reality. What was once specialized technology – secure chips for payment cards – has become ubiquitous infrastructure embedded in smartphones, cars, medical devices, home routers, industrial systems, and national infrastructure. These chips are more than just security tokens; they serve as digital passports, authenticating identities, and determining what can be trusted on a network. However, their invisibility creates risk. As technology advances at an exponential rate, so do the methods of attackers.

A secure chip does one fundamental task: it protects a secret – a cryptographic identity that proves authenticity. All other security measures rely on this foundation. But here's the catch: not only do chips store secrets; they also use them for calculations, communication, and responses. This is where physics cannot be negotiated. Even the slightest deviation in power consumption, electromagnetic emissions, or timing can leak information to an attacker with the right tools and expertise.

This is what our engineers are trained to exploit every day within our labs. They 'listen' to chips as an electricity provider would infer your daily routine from your power usage, stress-testing devices until they behave unexpectedly, introducing faults to observe how the chip responds, and learning how attackers would think, where information escapes, and how defenses must be redesigned.

The advent of quantum computing shifts this landscape without fanfare or science fiction. Quantum does not change what attackers are after – the secret; it merely accelerates the timeline for acquiring it. Problems that once took thousands of years to crack can now collapse into minutes or seconds with sufficient quantum capability. This is why static security fails. Any system designed to be secure once and then left untouched ages toward obsolescence.

The target remains the same, but the timeline disappears. With quantum computing, the actors who possess meaningful capability will not announce it; they'll use it quietly. We've already witnessed this with Harvest Now-Decrypt Later (HNDL) attacks, where large amounts of encrypted data is collected and stored for future quantum decryption.

Governments and regulators are moving to address this new reality by mandating that systems become quantum resilient within defined timelines. This isn't driven by theory or hype but by the stark fact that updating cryptography, hardware, and infrastructure takes years, while exploiting weaknesses can take mere moments.

When walking through our labs today, what strikes me most is not the sophistication of the tools but the discipline of the process. Access is tightly controlled, engineers are vetted and audited, and every experiment is documented. This is not curiosity-driven hacking; it's structured testing designed to surface weaknesses early while there's still time to fix them.

Preparing for quantum threats isn't about predicting the exact moment a breakthrough occurs but about accepting that once it does, there will be no grace period. The only responsible approach is to assume your systems will be attacked and ensure this happens under controlled conditions before someone else decides the timing.