AWS leans on prior ingenuity to face future AI and quantum threats

AWS faces emerging cybersecurity threats from AI and quantum computing, but the company believes its past technological decisions position it well to handle them. Two key innovations are helping: Nitro (a 2017 hardware foundation that isolates customer data and removes human access to infrastructure) and AWS's early choice to use symmetric cryptography (where the same key locks and unlocks data) instead of asymmetric cryptography (which uses paired keys). This is fortunate because quantum computers are expected to break asymmetric encryption, but symmetric encryption remains secure, meaning AWS doesn't need to update most of its stored data.