French Admiral Brueys anchored his fleet in a defensive line he considered unassailable at Aboukir Bay in 1798. Armed broadsides faced anyone approaching from the sea. The landward side went largely ungunned.
Mind the gap.
Along came Admiral Nelson who simply sailed the gap and unloaded cannons into the vulnerable French broadside. L’Orient exploded so massively everyone paused in awe at the catastrophic miscalculation.
Fast forward to France in 1992 when banks deployed chip-and-PIN nationally. They were a decade ahead of others with a celebrated “secure” alternative. Apparently Bernard Vian, then interning at Gemplus, stared into the gap. He says he watched engineers extract PINs from these cards in under ten minutes.
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.
The gap was known. The cards shipped anyway, vulnerable like a modern day L’Orient.
Lucky for him he was an intern who calmly sipped espresso while watching the world go up in flames, instead of being a sad conscript of Napoleon blown to bits off the coast of Egypt.
Vian writes that he sees “counterintuitive wisdom” in breaking your own systems. He frames it as philosophical rigor. In context, it’s ancient gap management discipline: document the weakness, deploy anyway, position knowledge asymmetry as a sophistication that nobody should exploit.
The way he uses history gives me some worry about his new product claiming post-quantum readiness. The threat is real. The structure is old.
Brueys knew where his guns weren’t pointing. Boom.
Vian knew where the PIN was vulnerable. Boom.
The real question of Quantum readiness and security is more about routine work than a secret squirrel lab and revolution, like do you know which systems rely on classic asymmetric encryption?
The engineers who built and work on them… must.