Building Trust in the Age of AI and Quantum Threats
Trust is becoming a critical challenge in today’s digital world, shaped by the rapid rise of Artificial Intelligence and the looming impact of quantum computing. As AI moves from centralized systems to the edge, it expands the attack surface and introduces new security risks. At the same time, future quantum computer capabilities threaten the cryptographic foundations we rely on today, making it essential to rethink how trust is built and maintained.
The new trust challenge in the AI era
As AI continues to scale across cloud and edge environments, securing modern infrastructure becomes a foundational requirement. Trust can no longer rely on software alone, devices must embed strong hardware-based security to ensure integrity, authenticity, and resilience.
This starts with core platform capabilities such as hardware-rooted identity, verified firmware boot, device attestation, and secure lifecycle management. At the edge, where AI is increasingly deployed, additional protections are essential: safeguarding user data at rest, in transit, and in use, protecting AI models from theft or tampering, and ensuring robustness against adversarial inputs.
In many industries, Artificial Intelligence, whether deployed at the edge or in the cloud, must also be protected against the emerging quantum computer threat. This is particularly critical as AI systems increasingly process and store highly sensitive data, including personal information from millions or even billions of users. Ensuring the long-term confidentiality and integrity of this data requires anticipating future risks today, including the capabilities of quantum computers. In this context, post-quantum cryptography (PQC) becomes a key enabler for securing AI-driven infrastructures over time.
At the heart of this approach lies a hardware Root of Trust, enabling critical security functions such as secure boot, key management and storage, secure provisioning, and protected debugging. Combined with anti-tampering mechanisms, security monitoring, side-channel attack countermeasures, cryptographic acceleration, and support for post-quantum cryptography, these capabilities form the foundation for building trusted and resilient AI systems.
Quantum computing: A new security paradigm
The transition to quantum-safe security is no longer a distant concern, it is becoming an urgent priority. Quantum computers are rapidly progressing, and they are expected to break today’s widely used cryptographic algorithms. This creates a critical risk: sensitive data encrypted could be harvested today and decrypted in the future, compromising long-term confidentiality.
Regulators are already anticipating this shift, defining clear milestones for the adoption of post-quantum cryptography (PQC). In many regions, the transition is expected between 2030 and 2035 for critical applications. Systems being designed today must remain secure for decades.
A key requirement in this context is crypto-agility. Future-proof devices must be capable of adapting to evolving standards and selecting the most appropriate cryptographic algorithms over time. This is especially important as PQC standards continue to mature, with emerging references such as ML-KEM (FIPS 203), ML-DSA (FIPS 204), SLH-DSA (FIPS 205), and FN-DSA (FIPS 206).
Crypto-agility is not just a theoretical concept; it addresses a very practical challenge. Today, widely adopted algorithms such as RSA or ECDSA are trusted for authentication and digital signatures. However, in a quantum era, these algorithms could become compromised. Systems must therefore be designed to seamlessly transition to PQC-based alternatives without requiring hardware replacement. This ability to upgrade cryptographic mechanisms dynamically is essential to ensure long-term security while preserving existing infrastructure and reducing operational costs.
However, adopting PQC is not sufficient on its own. Like any cryptographic implementation, PQC algorithms are vulnerable to hardware-based attacks such as side-channel attacks (SCA) and fault injection attacks (FIA). Ensuring robust protection against these threats is essential to guarantee real-world security.
To maintain the quality and the compliancy of the products during all of their lifetime, Secure-IC defined 4 pillars. With those pillars, Secure-IC ensures that its products can meet new market needs, with full coverage from hardware to software working efficiently in Secure-IC technology framework.
Would you like to learn more about these 4 pillars? Contact our experts team.
To address these challenges, modern security solutions must combine crypto-agility with strong hardware-level protection. This includes resistance to advanced physical attacks, efficient cryptographic implementations, and seamless support for both classical and post-quantum algorithms, enabling a smooth and secure transition toward a quantum-resilient future.
Conclusion
The shift to post-quantum cryptography is no longer optional—it is essential to ensure trust in a world shaped by AI and emerging quantum computer threats.
Building resilient systems requires a comprehensive approach: adopting PQC algorithms to withstand future attacks, implementing strong hardware protections against advanced physical threats such as side-channel and fault injection attacks, and ensuring crypto-agility to adapt to evolving standards and AI-driven use cases.
In a world where AI is becoming ubiquitous and data-driven decisions shape entire industries, the convergence of AI and PQC is not just a future concern, it is a present necessity.
As part of Cadence Design Systems, Secure-IC delivers end-to-end security solutions designed to protect next-generation systems, helping organizations build long-term trust in both AI-powered and quantum computer attack-resilient environments.
Watch now the presentation by Sara TEHRANIPOOR, Lead Application Engineer at Secure-IC, at IP SOC Days Silicon Valley 2026.