The Hidden Disconnect in Post-Quantum Cryptography: Discovery vs. Implementation

In the race to prepare for quantum computing, the cryptographic community has made monumental progress. Breakthroughs in lattice- and code-based cryptography have culminated in new standards, rigorous academic vetting, and the formalization of post-quantum cryptographic (PQC) algorithms like ML-KEM and ML-DSA.

But amid this momentum, a critical blind spot is emerging, one that few outside cryptography circles are talking about.It’s not a shortage of algorithms.

It’s the growing divide between cryptographic discovery and real-world implementation.

It’s important to start by saying this: discovery and implementation are not competing priorities. They are twin engines in the same aircraft. One propels us forward through innovation and mathematical confidence; the other ensures that these innovations are adopted safely, meaningfully, and at scale.

Yet today, they operate in silos. Researchers publish secure schemes. Standards bodies evaluate and endorse them. But when the time comes to deploy these solutions, organizations often find themselves staring at a blank page.

Where is our cryptography used? Can this PQC scheme work in our existing stack? Who is accountable for the transition?

Too often, the discovery side ends with a white paper. The implementation side begins with confusion.

One reason this disconnect persists is that cryptographic discovery and implementation are often treated as separate products, sometimes by different vendors, sometimes by different arms of the same organization. One builds the engine; the other assembles the car. Without tight coordination, even the most advanced cryptography can stall before it reaches the road.

Discovery is often driven by specialized teams within standards bodies, research units, or security vendors focused on formal rigor and cryptographic resilience. Implementation happens in the wild: legacy infrastructure, scattered systems, and under-resourced teams juggling business priorities. One defines what’s secure; the other defines what gets secured.

This difference doesn’t mean one side is more valuable than the other, but it does mean we can’t assume one naturally leads to the other. The bridge needs to be built intentionally.

Quantum computers capable of breaking today’s encryption may still be years away, but the store-now, decrypt-later threat is already active. Nation-states and malicious actors are harvesting encrypted data today to exploit it tomorrow.

That makes PQC migration not just a future-proofing exercise, but an urgent matter of data longevity and national security.

And yet, many organizations still delay. Why?

Because cryptographic implementation is invisible until it’s broken.

When a TLS certificate expires, systems crash. When a signature algorithm is deprecated, trust collapses. But until those moments, most cryptographic infrastructure is ignored, secure by assumption, not by design.

The good news? This gap between discovery and deployment isn’t a dead end. It’s a design flaw. And design flaws can be fixed.

The challenge isn’t just technical, it’s also architectural and procedural. We need:

In other words, we need to stop treating discovery as the final step and start treating it as the first.