Not a future problem. A present recording problem.
Every promise the Enkidu stack makes rests, in the end, on cryptography: Origi's chain of custody is signatures, Helios's artifact admission is signatures, every mesh link and reachback spoke is a key exchange. Against a cryptanalytically relevant quantum computer, today's public-key primitives break outright — and the harvest now, decrypt later attack means traffic recorded off a link today can be read retroactively the day such a machine exists. For a fabric carrying Protected B data with multi-decade sensitivity, the adversary needs no quantum computer now — only patience and storage.
The urgency is asymmetric: a signature forged in the future does not falsify the past, but a key exchange broken in the future retroactively exposes everything it protected. That is why Aegis's first wave is hybrid key establishment on links — and why the mandate horizon is not the quantum computer's arrival date, but the recording adversary's patience, subtracted from your data's lifetime.
- Hybrid post-quantum key establishment on every link
- Quantum-resistant signatures on every artifact & custody record
- A hash-based-signed boot chain — the root of the argument
- Crypto-agility as a fleet operation, not a rebuild
- Compliance evidence generated from the fleet itself
One primary, one reserve — per function
Finalised NIST standards, deployed in hybrid constructions, with a designated backup on different mathematics behind every primary — so a cryptanalytic surprise is a policy flip, not a crisis program.
Profiles: the standard profile follows NIST Level 3 and Cyber Centre guidance for Protected B; the defence ceiling follows CNSA 2.0. FN-DSA (Falcon) is tracked for the most bandwidth-starved links once FIPS 206 finalises. And no algorithm outside the NIST process appears at all.
Changing cryptography
is a rollout, not a program.
The active suite is declared per fleet segment in a signed, versioned crypto-policy artifact, distributed by Helios Grid exactly like a model: staged waves, health gates, automatic rollback, full custody. Flipping a fleet from ML-KEM-768 to ML-KEM-1024 — or, in the surprise scenario, from lattices to codes — is an operations task.
The fleet's Cryptographic Bill of Materials is a query over Helios node twins, not a manual audit — the compliance evidence for every mandate milestone. And deprecation is enforced to the strict standard: a vulnerable algorithm is first non-default, then tunnelled, then removed from the build — so "prove RSA is gone" is answered from the record.
PQC's tax is bytes,
not cycles.
A hybrid handshake costs tens of microseconds of compute but kilobytes of bandwidth — so Aegis budgets bytes explicitly: long-lived, resumed sessions amortise handshakes across hours; hubs verify node signatures locally and forward hub-signed aggregates, so per-node signatures never transit the reachback link individually — composing exactly with Helios's signal-not-data reduction.
Compute concentrates where the fabric's compute already is: ARM-optimised embedded PQC on the node and hub tiers; GPU-accelerated batched verification (cuPQC-class, millions of operations per second) at the fusion-centre tiers. And a definite position: no QKD on this fabric — special-purpose optics, unfit for tactical topologies, no authentication, and excluded by allied national-security guidance.
