What it means for a BPM to be quantum-resistant, and how to verify it

Every time a software vendor says “quantum-safe”, one question is worth asking: which layer, exactly? The answer separates a security posture from a brochure adjective. This article explains ours, with the scope written down.

The threat is today, not 2035

The cryptographically relevant quantum computer does not exist. But the threat that matters does not need it: it is called harvest now, decrypt later — capture encrypted traffic or backups now, store them, decrypt them when the machine exists. For data with a long confidential life — tax files, medical records, credit decisions, industrial secrets — “ten years from now” falls well inside the period in which that data still has to stay confidential.

So the right question is not “when will it arrive?” but “will what I am transmitting today, encrypted the way I encrypt it today, be readable then?”.

What a quantum computer breaks, and what it does not

Cryptography has two families, and a quantum computer treats them very differently.

• Asymmetric cryptography — RSA, elliptic curves — is the one that falls. Shor’s algorithm solves, in polynomial time, the mathematical problems it rests on. It is the cryptography of TLS key exchange, of digital signatures, of certificates.
• Symmetric cryptography — AES-256, SHA-512 — does not fall in any practical sense. Grover’s algorithm reduces the effective strength of AES-256 to about 128 post-quantum bits, still computationally infeasible, and SHA-512 keeps ample margins. NSA’s CNSA 2.0 — the algorithm suite the agency mandates for national security systems — retains them as quantum-resistant.

From this follows a simple rule: data whose confidentiality rests only on symmetric primitives, with keys that never travelled through an asymmetric exchange, is not exposed to future quantum decryption.

How Dexon BPM applies it

Dexon BPM encrypts business data in two layers of its own, on top of the hosting’s TLS:

1. In transit, every request and response body between the browser and the API travels encrypted with AES-256, under keys derived per session with PBKDF2 and SHA-512. Where TLS is terminated — load balancers, corporate proxies, inspection appliances — the inspector sees the envelope, not the content.
2. At rest, the designated categories of data — configuration, integration credentials, confidential business fields, the event log of every case — are encrypted column by column with AES-256 inside the database. An exfiltrated backup does not hand them over in the clear.

Both layers use exclusively symmetric primitives, and their keys derive from shared secrets — the session token and, before login, a per-deployment secret delivered through a separate channel. No key of those layers ever travelled through an asymmetric exchange that a quantum computer could reconstruct.

The claim, with its exact scope:

Dexon BPM provides quantum-resistant confidentiality of business data in transit and at rest — because its own layers use only symmetric primitives aligned with CNSA 2.0, not because the underlying TLS is post-quantum yet.

How to read any vendor’s claim

Three questions are enough:

1. Which layer? If the answer is “TLS”, ask whether the key exchange is already post-quantum. Today, it almost never is.
2. Where do the keys come from? If they travelled through a classical asymmetric exchange, data captured today is decryptable tomorrow, whatever symmetric cipher is used afterwards.
3. Which layers does the claim cover, and how is it validated? A vendor who can name the exact layers behind the claim, and the framework it is validated against, has thought it through.

The full posture — architecture, cryptographic summary, integration controls and the NIST CSF 2.0 mapping — is on the security page, and the document for your security team is available under NDA from security@dexon.us.

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