Harvest Now, Forge Later: The Other Half of the Quantum Threat

Most post-quantum planning focuses on the data an attacker could steal today and decrypt years from now. That's only half the exposure. The other half is what happens when the same capability lets someone reproduce a signature, issue a certificate your systems trust, or sign code your infrastructure installs without question. Call it harvest now, forge later.

In this session, part of Axiad's PQC Playbook series, Bassam Al-Khalidi, Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer at Axiad, joins Saqib Ahmad, an industry expert in network observability for a candid conversation about what post-quantum migration actually looks like in a large environment.

The discussion covers why cryptographic inventory is the real starting point, why no single discovery method sees everything, and where cryptography tends to hide: badge readers, security cameras, operational technology running software from the 1990s, and keys that live outside any formal certificate program. The panel also gets specific about crypto agility, including how long it really takes to replace an entire trust chain across a global environment.

No product pitch. A practitioner-level conversation for teams who have to plan this work.

What you'll take away:

- Why signature forgery is a longer-tailed exposure than data decryption

- What a cryptographic bill of materials needs beyond a list of certificates

- The two ways migration programs most often stall

- How to decide what to address first when the inventory runs to millions of assets

- What recovery time means for a trust chain, and how far most organizations are from it

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