up:: 00 Field Guide Map
Why This Exists
Security saves people.
I’ve believed that with every ounce of my being for my entire career. Done right, security quietly protects someone who will never know their information was ever at risk. Done too late, real lives get wrecked. That belief is why this guide exists, and why I care about the quantum transition as much as I do.
I’m Addie LaMarr, a cryptographer with 15 years in cybersecurity. Eight of them were in the U.S. Air Force as an applied cryptographer doing COMSEC and INFOSEC, keeping communications and information secure; the years since have gone to the cryptography that protects everyone else. Today I run a post-quantum cryptography consultancy, and I built this guide to make the quantum migration feel doable instead of overwhelming, for the clients I take through it and for anyone else who needs it.
Why I take this so seriously
Almost all of the cryptography protecting your bank, your medical records, and the systems your life quietly depends on rests on a handful of math problems that a large enough quantum computer will break. That machine doesn’t exist yet, and the trap is this: an adversary can start winning before it ever arrives. They record encrypted data today and open it the day the machine is real. For anything that has to stay private for a decade, the clock is already running.
This is a life-and-death problem for the systems that hold people’s lives, and two things are making it worse.
- It’s gatekept, locked behind academic jargon and complexity that make capable, competent people feel like this is somebody else’s job.
- It’s overwhelming, presented as so vast and technical that the honest reaction is to freeze and do nothing.
Meanwhile, almost no one is treating it with the urgency it actually deserves.
We just lived through what it costs to be caught flat-footed. AI arrived faster than the world was ready for, and we spent years reacting to it instead of preparing. The quantum break is different in one hopeful way: we can see this one coming.
The standards are ready, the time is there if we start now, and we have a real chance to get ahead of a disaster instead of cleaning up after one.
I refuse to watch us sleepwalk into the same mistake twice.
What I actually want
What I want out of all of this is simple. I want everyone to take the threat as seriously as it deserves, and to believe they can actually do something about it, because they can. The overwhelm is a lie told by complexity. And more than anything, I want us to come through this without a great disaster that ruins people’s lives.
I want your data protected, and my own just as much. None of that’s abstract to me. Every encrypted record is a person somewhere trusting that what’s theirs stays theirs, and keeping that trust is the entire point of the work.
Where these notes came from
The honest origin: I have aphantasia, a blind mind’s eye. I can’t picture things in my head the way most people can, so to truly understand something I have to physically write every piece of it down and lay out how the parts connect.
This guide started as exactly that: my own notes, built up over years, as I taught myself how the whole quantum transition actually fits together, one standard and threat at a time.
Why "LaMarr"
I named my firm after Hedy Lamarr, the movie star who co-invented the frequency hopping that a huge amount of secure communication still traces back to, and who spent her life celebrated for her face and waved off as an inventor. Carrying that forward matters to me.
But at the most basic level, these pages are simply my personal notes, made as a labor of love, cleaned up and given away for anyone who wants to learn this topic and understand how it fits into the larger world.
What this is, and what it’s for
Everything here is checked against the primary source, the actual standards, regulations, and papers, with the citation right there so you can go read it yourself. It’s written to be understood from zero and still be precise enough for the engineer doing the real work.
It’s free, all of it, because the core problem in this field is that the knowledge got locked away, and I would rather do the exact opposite.
Walk it front to back if the whole thing is new, or drop into any note when you need one answer.
If your team is actually migrating a real system against a hard deadline, that’s the work I do, and there’s a quiet invitation to talk at the bottom of the sections. You owe me nothing for the map, though. It’s yours.
What I want most is for you to leave here taking this seriously and believing you can handle it, because you can, and it matters more than almost anyone is admitting yet.
Welcome. Let me show you the terrain.
Last verified 2026-07-09 · Written and maintained by Addie LaMarr, LaMarr Labs.