Questions, answered.

Most of the internet relies on public-key cryptography such as RSA and elliptic curves (ECDH, X25519) to exchange keys. Their security rests on math problems (factoring and discrete logarithms) that a large quantum computer could solve efficiently using Shor's algorithm.

Symmetric encryption like AES-256 remains robust. The weak link is the key exchange: break it, and the attacker gets the key that unlocks everything else.

A quantum computer uses qubits, which can exploit superposition and entanglement. It isn't simply a faster computer: for most tasks it offers no advantage.

But for a few specific problems, including the ones that protect today's key exchanges, it can be dramatically faster than any classical machine.

Post-quantum cryptography is a family of algorithms that run on ordinary computers but are designed to resist attacks from both classical and quantum computers.

In August 2024, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) published its first post-quantum standards, including ML-KEM (FIPS 203) for key exchange. It's the algorithm QuorVault uses.

Attackers can copy encrypted data today (a database dump, intercepted traffic) and simply store it until a quantum computer is able to decrypt it.

Data that must stay confidential for years (customer records, health, financial or personal information) is therefore already at risk, even if quantum computers don't exist yet at scale.

Nobody knows precisely, and estimates vary widely. What is certain is that migrating cryptography takes years, and that data stolen today can be decrypted whenever that moment arrives.

That's why governments and standards bodies recommend starting the transition to post-quantum cryptography now.

QuorVault encrypts the sensitive data stored in your database (emails, phone numbers, customer information and any other field you choose) with hybrid classical + post-quantum encryption.

Two key exchanges run side by side: X25519, the classical standard used by Chrome and Signal, and ML-KEM-768, the NIST post-quantum standard. HKDF-SHA256 combines both secrets into a single final key.

To recover that key, an attacker must break X25519 and ML-KEM. Even someone who breaks the classical part with a quantum computer still can't access your data.

No, and you should be wary of anyone who does. Every building block is public and standardized: X25519, ML-KEM-768 (FIPS 203), AES-256-GCM, HKDF-SHA256 and Argon2id, all provided by OpenSSL 3.5, the most widely deployed open-source cryptography library.

They get ciphertext. Your values are encrypted with a data key, and that key is itself encrypted by the hybrid scheme and kept in a vault protected by a strong password. Without the vault and its password, the stolen data is unreadable.

No. Each encrypted value is bound to its exact location: table, column and row ID. Move it anywhere else and decryption fails, so values can't be swapped or replayed between records.

Not directly in SQL. Once a column is encrypted, the database only sees ciphertext, so sorting and searching on it must happen in your application after decryption.

We help you choose which columns to encrypt during installation, so that sensitive data is protected without breaking the queries you rely on.

Your values are encrypted with AES-256-GCM, one of the fastest ciphers available, with hardware acceleration on modern CPUs. The post-quantum layer protects the data key, not every single value, so its cost stays small. On our benchmark, 100,000 rows are migrated in seconds.

QuorVault is founded by Mathis Sireul, a cybersecurity student at Guardia Cybersecurity School. See the About page for the story, and the Security page for exactly what QuorVault does and doesn't protect against.

Write to contact@quorvault.com or use the contact form with a few words about your database. We'll come back with a free, tailored quote: a diagnostic, installation only, or installation with monthly support.