I oversee a lab where engineers try to destroy my life’s work. It’s the only way to prepare for quantum threats

The first time I handed over my credit card to a security lab, it came back to me broken. Not physically damaged, but compromised. In less than 10 minutes, the engineers had discovered my PIN.

This happened in the early 1990s, when I was a young engineer starting an internship at one of the companies that helped create the smart card industry. I believed my card was secure. I believed the system worked. But watching strangers casually extract something that was supposed to be secret and protected was a shock. It was also the moment I realized how insecure security actually is, and the devastating impact security breaches could have on individuals, global enterprises, and governments.

Most people assume security is about building something that’s unbreakable. In reality, security is about understanding exactly how something breaks, under what conditions, and how quickly. That is why, today, I run labs where engineers are paid to attack the very chips my company designs. They measure power fluctuations, inject electromagnetic signals, fire lasers, and strip away layers of silicon. Their job is to behave like criminals and hostile nation-states on purpose, because the only honest way to build trust is to try to destroy it first.

To someone outside the security world, this approach sounds counterintuitive. Why spend years designing secure hardware, only to invite people to tear it apart? The answer is straightforward: Trust that has never been te...