Nigerian Building-Tech Event Flags Post-Quantum Security Risk

Post-quantum cryptography reached an unusual venue last week at a fire and building-safety conference in Lagos. Indeed, at the fourth Pestra Tech Day, Red Hat specialist adoption architect Francis Anyaegbu told an audience of consultants, integrators, contractors and end users that the connected devices filling modern buildings have become an expanding security risk. His talk, “Intelligent Security & the Quantum Challenge,” was the quantum-relevant thread in an event otherwise focused on fire detection, physical security, communications and facility operations.

What the Red Hat talk argued

Anyaegbu described smart cameras, digital access readers, edge sensors and video-conferencing systems as a growing front line of enterprise risk as AI speeds up both attacks and defenses. He argued that organizations should move past perimeter-based controls toward quantum-safe architectures built on digital trust and machine-speed defense, with post-quantum cryptography and digital sovereignty as the foundations, plus tighter governance of automated AI agents.

He supported the case with several figures, all of which came from his own presentation rather than an independent source:

• Data breaches now cost an average of $5.0 million per incident
• Exposure rises by about $1,100 for every hour an attacker stays undetected
• Deepfakes have surged around 1,500 percent
• Unmonitored “Shadow AI” is spreading inside organizations

The quantum part of the pitch rested on the familiar claim that quantum computing threatens conventional encryption. No quantum computer capable of breaking that encryption exists today, so the case is a preparation argument, and post-quantum cryptography answers it with new classical algorithms rather than quantum hardware.

The wider event

Quantum security was a small part of the program. The Controller General of the Federal Fire Service, S.A. Olumode, gave the keynote on closing Nigeria’s fire and life-safety gap, and speakers from Honeywell and Hanwha Vision, plus a Dutch pneumatic-tube maker, covered fire detection, AI video analytics, intelligent alarms and building logistics. Pestra, which hosted the event and distributes security and safety systems, used it to introduce an expanded product portfolio spanning communications, surveillance, access control and physical security.

The common thread across the day was convergence. Fire protection, physical security, communications and cybersecurity increasingly run as one connected environment, which is why a post-quantum argument turned up at a fire-safety forum at all.