Key Management: The Hardest Part
Every cryptographic guarantee in this series ultimately rests on one thing: the key stays secret and available to exactly the right parties. That's not a math problem — it's an operational one, and it's where real systems fail. A perfect algorithm with a key committed to a Git repo, hardcoded in an image, or never rotated is worthless. Key management is the unglamorous discipline that decides whether all the cryptography actually protects anything.
Every cryptographic guarantee rests on one thing: the key stays secret and available to exactly the right parties. That's not a math problem — it's an operational one, and it's where real systems fail. A perfect algorithm with a key committed to Git is worthless.