Your systems can prove who signed an instruction.
They cannot tell you whether it should be carried out.
Everything we build lives in that gap.Kolm Shield judges whether an approved instruction should be carried out, before it becomes irreversible, and keeps what your systems hold confidential, against today’s attackers and tomorrow’s quantum computers.
- Protects
- Data in transit and at rest
- Standards
- NIST FIPS 203 · 204 · 205
- First sector
- Financial services
- Status
- Patent pending, PCT filed
The attack looks legitimate.
A stolen credential does not produce a suspicious instruction. It produces a correctly signed one, and every check you own approves it, correctly.
A stolen key is one way. A deceived approver, a manipulated input and an insider produce the same approved instruction.
Post-quantum migration ensures a signature cannot be forged. It does nothing about a correctly signed instruction that should never have been carried out.
The attack is prepared in the interval no control measures.
Post-quantum migration, access control and incident detection are each necessary, and each answers its own question well. What none of them measures is the interval in which an attack is prepared, through a stolen login, a deceived approver or a manipulated input, on a channel that is cryptographically sound and often weeks before anyone classifies an incident.
Can this signature or session be broken?
Not once it is migrated, including by a future quantum computer. It says nothing about whether what is signed should be carried out.
Is this credential valid?
Yes, and that is the difficulty: a stolen credential is a valid one, and every check approves it, correctly.
Has an incident occurred?
Usually answered after the act. The weeks before it are the interval disclosures and controls were never designed to count.
Should this approved instruction be carried out, before it becomes irreversible?
Answered before the act, with the reasons attached, on cryptography built to outlast the algorithms in use today.
Each instruction your systems pass to it comes back with a signed verdict (proceed, or verify first) and the reasons behind it, leaving a record your auditors and your regulator can check afterwards: what was known, and when.
- Beside the path, by default.It advises and your systems decide. It can be removed at any stage.
- Warnings with their working.Every reason is stated in terms agreed with your team in advance.
- Built for the failure mode.The whole of financial services first; the same two acts everywhere else.
The calendar is set by other people.
The window to move early is the current procurement cycle, not the next one. The institutions that migrate last will be the ones whose archives were worth taking first.
The thinking is public. The build is not.
The Uncounted
Two measured categories of loss, and a third that neither captures. Four South African cases from the public record, read as one pattern.
Now publishing · No. 01 of 05Before It Becomes Materiala newsletter for boards
- IThe three weeks nobody countsDwell time, and the interval financial-sector controls and disclosures were never designed to measure.Read →
- IIOne provider, many perimetersThird-party concentration, and why an institution’s own controls cannot see the environment that now holds its clients’ data.Read →
- IIIThe request that looked legitimateTrusted channels, and what happens when a process is followed correctly and the request itself is fraudulent.Read →
- IVIdentity at the sourceWhat happens to onboarding checks once the documents they depend on are themselves in circulation.Read →
We would rather be tested early than admired late.
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