Issue Small devices and legacy infrastructure cannot carry the new load, shifting attacks to implementation

Summary

The Dubai Future Foundation outlook expects the shift to lattice-based cryptography to be uneven. Small devices such as wearables and embedded sensors cannot yet manage the heavier computing load that lattice methods demand. Older infrastructure is also hard to upgrade, particularly where systems are fragmented or outdated. Protocols, operating systems and devices would need to adopt new standards together without breaking services that depend on them, so old and new encryption may run side by side for a time. As the mathematics becomes stronger, attackers may increasingly target flaws in design and deployment. That raises the stakes for engineering and implementation rather than for the cryptography itself.