.png){kind=logo}
One of the quieter objections to post-quantum cryptography is speed. The new algorithms use larger keys and signatures, and many engineers assume that means slower systems. Ameritec IPS decided to put numbers on it.
The Texas company's Q-Fortress, a storage layer built on NIST's post-quantum standards, comes with a performance report that Ameritec offers to prospective clients. The figures come from the company's own testing, so they should be read as vendor results. Even so, they are more specific than most marketing in this field.
The idea is simple to describe. Applications stop writing straight to a database and talk to Q-Fortress instead. It checks who is asking, encrypts the data, records the action and then stores it. Every record is sealed with AES-256-GCM. Connections use post-quantum key exchange and certificates, ML-KEM-1024 and ML-DSA-87, and older, weaker protocols are refused. Every action goes into a hash-chained log, so any edit, deletion or reordering after the fact can be detected.
It ships as containers and runs on a single server, either in the cloud or on a client's own premises. It offers REST and gRPC interfaces along with a web console for operators.
Ameritec is also careful to say it does not use proprietary cryptography. The catalogue lists the standards Q-Fortress relies on: FIPS 203 for ML-KEM, FIPS 204 for ML-DSA, FIPS 197 for AES, NIST SP 800-38D for the GCM mode, and TLS 1.3. Sticking to published standards matters in this field, because home-grown encryption has a long history of failing once outsiders examine it.
According to the Q-Fortress Performance Benchmark Report v1.0, dated September 2026, a single instance handled 7,463 encrypted requests per second at peak. Typical worst-case response time, measured at the 99th percentile, was 3.9 milliseconds at 1,000 requests per second. Reads stayed at 0.7 milliseconds with a million records stored. The extra cost of full quantum safety was put at 2.7 milliseconds per new connection, with nothing extra per request.
Two resilience tests stand out. Across three simulated power cuts, all 738 confirmed writes came back intact. And the encryption key was rotated under live traffic with zero failed requests. The company says a 1 GB store re-encrypts in about ten seconds.
Ameritec also reports zero exploitable vulnerabilities after three phases of security testing. These were ten automated scans that included fuzzing with 32 million inputs, two independent penetration-test passes, and two full source reviews with a live attack run. That testing was carried out by the vendor, and the full report is available only under a non-disclosure agreement, a detail worth keeping in mind.
The company is targeting data centres and cloud hosts that could sell quantum-safe storage as a premium service, along with banks and fintechs that hold long-lived customer records. Hospitals, government and defence agencies preparing for post-quantum mandates, legal data rooms and IoT deployments are also on its list. Q-Fortress also produces a cryptographic inventory in the CycloneDX CBOM format, something that is becoming more useful as regulators ask organisations to map where their cryptography lives.
Single-server benchmarks under a vendor's own load profile say little about behaviour at large scale or across regions, and independent replication would carry more weight. Still, the results fit a wider view in the industry that, for many workloads, the cost of post-quantum security falls mostly on the initial handshake rather than on every request.
Q-Fortress is available now for pilot deployments, and Ameritec says a first dataset can be protected in weeks rather than years. The company applies the same cryptographic approach to its blockchain project, Q-AMCHAIN, whose code was audited by CertiK this autumn.
