Into to Quantum, quantum computing, and post-quantum preparation.

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]Hey everybody, thanks for joining me for my quantum presentation about the quantum break is coming. Will you be prepared? This is going to be I think the first time I've done this quantum talk completely online in a lot of years, a lot of updated content. If you are wondering what is quantum, what is quantum computing, how it's going to impact you and your organization, and what you need to do to prepare for Qday, this is the talk. So, thank you so much for being here. Uh, if you don't know me, I'm Roger Grimes. I've been doing cyber security for 39 years. Earned all of these gray hairs. Uh I've written 16 books and over 1,600 magazine articles and I'd say two of the books on that involve quantum computing and probably somewhere around many dozens to maybe hundred articles on quantum computing and quantum Qday and all that stuff. And here is my latest book, How AI and Quantum Impact Cyber Threats and Defenses. And you can see the link on the screen. I give you a link to Amazon where you can buy a physical copy or a link a PDF copy where you can download and uh get a free copy of the book and I recommend that people download and read it if they want the PDF version and you can share it especially with teachers and students that are uh studying this topic or in cyber security. I think it's a really great book on both topics. I've been doing uh quantum uh really ever since I heard about Peter Shor's uh algorithmic breakthrough. will cover that. Uh he announced that he was able to break uh had come up within a way to break uh much of today's traditional cryptography in 1994. I probably started talking about quantum and quantum attacks and things like that probably around 1996. So I've been doing it for over two decades. Again, I've written two books involving quantum quantum computing and quantum qday. I'm an active uh member of the cloud security alliance. I I wrote uh I was the major author uh on one of their major uh white papers on how you can prepare for the coming quantum Q day and I'll give you a link to that near the end. I've worked uh for a couple years for the World Economic Forums Quantum Working Group and I've just in general been talking on this topic for well over two decades.

[00:02:08]And although while I may not be the world's expert in quantum physics and quantum computing, I do think I am one of the world experts if not the guy you want to be talking to and how you prepare uh for the coming quantum Qday.

[00:02:24]So with that said, we're going to get right into it and and also I'm employed by Noble before. I've been with no before for over eight years. Been my favorite job and they let me speak on quantum all the time. It's a wonderful thing. Uh but I like to start off by sharing this kind of surprising thought that even the computer you're using today is a quantum computer. Uh quantum and quantum mechanics rules all things.

[00:02:48]Your current computer, your current computing devices only work because of quantum physics. The CPU on your laptop and your computers and your watches only work because of quantum mechanics. The difference is that with true quantum computers and devices, they work by storing and processing information on individual quantum particles like electrons or photons. And we're going to talk more about this, but on a traditional computer or computing device, in order to create a bit, a zero or one, it might take a million electrons, a million electrons for that computing device to detect a zero or a one. They usually have particular voltages like plus or minus 5 volts will indicate whether it's a one or zero bit.

[00:03:38]And it might take a million electrons or if you have a CDROM optical reader, it might take a million photons, which are the smallest particles of light to create enough of a measurement in order to be detected as a zero or one bit. But with quantum computers and quantum devices, uh it only takes a single electron, a single uh photon to store a one or zero and and process and output a one or a zero. Uh and that's just the beginning of one of the many remarkable properties of quantum computers and quantum devices. Uh the major reason why y'all are all here today is the coming quantum day or Q day. That's the day when sufficiently capable uh sufficiently capable sometimes I call cryptographically sufficient quantum computers uh are able to break much of the traditional public key asymmetric uh cryptography and every secret it protects. uh in particular the ones that we really worry about quantum computers being able to break it's RSA diffy helman elliptic curve crypto cryptography elggo and you know PKI public key infrastructure digital certificates digital signatures TLS HTTPS if you're connecting on the internet today your browser more than likely has that little lock icon and you have an HTTPS connect you know in your URL and that means it's using TLS to connect securely connect from your computer to the web server server that is probably using RFA or ECC elliptic curve cryptography or something like that. So it is quantum susceptible to quantum computer attacks. Uh most VPNs are going to be susceptible to it. Most login uh smart cards uh your Wi-Fi router uh that you use in your house. Uh cryptocurren people often ask me does you know will quantum computers be able to break uh cryptocurrencies? not their blockchains, but the wallets that are used by people to insert and store and remove value from those blockchains.

[00:05:34]Those are most most of those uh wallets, cryptocurrency wallets are quantum susceptible. But I always tell people that, you know, if we're if you're worried about cryptocurrency, you're almost worried about the the wrong thing because we really need to be worrying about our banking system, our swift global banking system, our credit cards and our banks and stuff like that. Uh cryptocurrencies are really a very small small part of overall uh global value.

[00:05:59]Uh we need to get our banking system and Visa and Mastercard and stuff like that make sure they're quantum resistant before the day Q day comes along. Uh but it's also quantum computers uh sufficiently capable quantum computers aren't going to just weaken asymmetric uh encryption uh in cryptography. It's also going to weaken cut in half the protective strength of a lot of other cryptography like symmetric cryptography, AES, uh digital signatures, uh digital hashes, uh and even random number generators. So, it's not just the asymmetric keys, uh the RSA and diffy helmets and stuff like that.

[00:06:37]It's it's really all most of cryptography is going to be weakened in some way by sufficiently capable quantum computers. uh but asymmetric cryptography particularly so it it it immediately renders them or will immediately render many of them kind of worthless as protection. So in the near future, we're not sure when although it's looking more and more like it's going to be a year or two within 2030 on either side of 2030. So 20 you know 2028 2029 2030 2031 2032 somewhere in there.

[00:07:12]uh we're going to have those uh sufficiently capable cryptographically relevant quantum computers will be able to break that that quantum susceptible encryption and and let me say today most of our cryptography is quantum susceptible and all of us uh hopefully you're already involved in this if not after hearing this talk today you're going to get your organization involved in an official postquantum project that has executive management support uh that has a dedicated project leader that has resources and budget and funding because this cryptographic migration that you're going to have to undergo you at home uh your cards, your watches, your computers, your Wi-Fi routers, uh your laptops, uh all of that's going to have to be uh upgraded and migrated to what they call postquantum, which means protected against those sufficiently capable quantum attacks. For most organizations, this is going to be a multi-year project. Let me say most organizations are even unaware of this.

[00:08:15]They certainly don't have a budget for it. Uh but most organizations starting in 2026, uh are going to be involved in a multi a multi-year postquantum project that's going to touch every piece of hardware and software they have that has electricity and IP address running through it. uh and going to impact everybody and again even impact the stuff at home if they are you know picking up work stuff at home emails and things like that their phones and their Wi-Fi routers and the computers at home need to be uh postquantum need to be uh quantum resistant so we're going to talk all about that today but I'm going to spend probably half of this course if not a little bit more talking about what is quantum because when people hear quantum like what is it they just heard that it's weird and strange uh and we're going to talk about it and what some of the weird strange things are and why it's important. We're going to talk about quantum computers and quantum devices and quantum sensors and all kinds of cool things. Then we'll talk about the Qday cryptographic break and then how you and your organization need to prepare. Uh so starting with what is quantum quantum uh also known as quantum mechanics or quantum physics. They're kind of uh they're not the same thing but they're kind of the same thing. If you say quantum physics or quantum mechanics, we mostly talk about them in the same way. It's really how everything works. All of nature, everything, all matter, all waves, all energy can be uh broken down into these what what physics calls these elementary particles.

[00:09:42]Elementary particles are particles that can't be further subdivided as far as we know into smaller things and there's you can see these particles the names of these particles on your screen and some of them are quite strange some of them might be familiar uh but element again the elementary particles of physics make up everything everything that we see do feel ourselves our brains or computers are made of these uh elementary particles which for quantum purposes we'll call elementary particles, quantum particles. Uh, and when you know when I went to school and took science and stuff, I was told that an atom or the things that made up an atom were the smallest uh constituent parts of matter.

[00:10:23]Uh, that and an atom was made of an electron, protons, and neutrons. Uh, and they were the smallest things that could be divided. But, uh, even when I went to high school 40 years ago, more than 40 years ago, uh, we knew that protons and neutrons were not elementary particles.

[00:10:38]That they were actually made up of quarks. Every proton and neutron is made up of three quarks. Up and down quarks.

[00:10:44]And let me tell you, quarks got some funny names. Up, down, charm, strange, bottom, top, really str. And those names have nothing to do with what those uh quarks do. Uh but an electron is an elementary particle and as far as you know, cannot be further broken down. But protons and neutrons are not elementary particles and they can be broken down into uh three quarks. Again, three up and down quarks. uh and they make up atoms and make up everything in the universe. And uh most quantum computers are made up of either electrons or um or photons, which is the smallest particle of light. When you're seeing light and light's entering your retina and stuff, it's really these individual photons that are that are coming. And when we look at those elementary particles and let me say scientists started to really examine them uh and look at how they behaved back in the early 1900s uh they realized that some of the things they were doing were counterintuitive than what we see and what we would call our classical microscopic world. It was counterintuitive and and and physicists started to go, "Wow, this is distinctly different." And it made up kind of an entirely new type of physics, which they called quantum physics, but really and they called the kind of the older Newtonian physics that kind of revolved around gravity, uh, classic physics. And so you'll still hear it called classic physics and quantum physics, but really quantum physics is all physics. There is no there is no separate thing. If you see that, that's just someone that's talking in kind of an older mistaken way. But when the scientists looked at these quantum elementary particles, they saw some really strange weird things.

[00:12:21]And I'm going to explain a couple of those things going forward, but there's dozens and dozens of quantum properties.

[00:12:27]And again, a lot of them were so strange and weird uh that and let me say when you read about a lot of them, when I talk about them today, it may kind of hurt your head. and that they just again many times seem counterintuitive to what we see what we readily observe in the macroscopic world. Uh Einstein was an early discoverer of quantum physics uh and he even got his only Nobel physics prize uh for being an early discoverer of quantum physics in 1921. He didn't get any Nobel physics prizes for in for inventing or discovering his special theory of relativity in general theory of relativity. he died unfortunately by the time the Nobel committee uh were going to consider those theories and they didn't for some reason I don't know why the Nobel committee doesn't give uh Nobel prizes to dead people but anyways Einstein was an early discover when he saw some of the counterintuitive things such as entanglement which we're going to talk about in just a minute it's so uh he he just couldn't believe that's the way the universe worked and he actually went uh died thinking that he had gotten quantum physics wrong uh and that you know entanglement and some of these other things couldn't have been true the way that we uh thought we were what we were seeing it couldn't be true but it turned out they were true and today quantum mechanics quantum physics and the way these things operate are among the most proven sciences in the world today most scientists the vast majority of scientists no longer uh you know think that quantum physics isn't real almost every Nobel physics prize given out since at least the 1950s has been scientists better proving that quantum physics, quantum mechanics exist and exists and operates in a particular way. And every experiment done to prove that quantum mechanics isn't the way the universe works has failed. Uh again, and there's all these kind of what seems to be to to us to be wild and strange quantum behaviors. Uh but they are real, they are proven, but we just don't we we know what they do, especially mathematically. We know how they operate, but we don't know why they do it or how they do it sometimes. But and sometimes it's so weird that we don't even know how to to describe it correctly. And I like to liken it to uh it's like when the Spanish concistadors met the Mexican Aztec uh Indians in the late 19 in the late 1400s. Uh the Aztec Indians had never seen iron, you know, plates of armor or gun or or horses or or rifles and gunpowder. And they said, "Hey, these are half men, half animal gods, uh you know, they had, you know, had stuff that, you know, had skin that could not be penetrated and they had spears of fire, right? They just they were trying to describe what they saw, which they they didn't know of in terms that are relevant to them in their current world." Well, that's kind of where we are in the quantum physics world. We we we know we we know that quantum physics is real, but we're not all the time understanding how to describe it correctly. Uh and and you know, we're the Aztecs. And you know, like one of the things I you know, one of the traits I like to kind of talk about uh are just kind of crazy things is when you go out at night and look at a star, uh that star is not where you think that star is. uh the photon is leaving that star and it it takes a long time for it to get to your retina of your eye to see that star. Well, the closest star is the sun which is only 8 minutes away. But most of the other stars are at least a year or two away if not tens of thousands of years away. So for most of us when you look up at a night sky and you see a star, that's not where that star is at the moment you're looking up. That's where that star was and the photon left that star and then it took years or tens of thousands of years to enter your retina. And really what you're looking at now is not where that star is. But quantum physics also says, and this is a proven thing, that when you decided at that moment to look up in the sky at that star and catch that photon that had started out years to tens of thousands of years ago, that that changed the behavior of that photon at the beginning of when it left the star uh before you decided to look up.

[00:16:40]And if you just decided not to look up at that instance, it would change the behavior of that photon when it left the star years to 10,000 years ago. But it appears as if us looking up uh at the and capturing the photon in our eye and doing what's called measuring observing and measuring that photon changes its behavior in the past. Uh you know and that's probably not what's happening but we don't we're the Aztecs uh you know in the 1490s and we don't know how to correctly describe uh what's going on but uh we know it's happening uh but we don't know exactly how it is or why it is. uh but we only know that it's happening. But I think as the decades go on, we're going to further clarify quantum physics and then our kids and grandkids one day will just they won't think that quantum physics is weird and strange. It's just going to be the way that the whole universe works like we understand gravity today, right? Or that the uh earth goes around the sun and not the other way around and that sort of stuff. Well, one day quantum physics will just be physics and uh there won't be any strange they won't call it strange or weird. It's just the way the world's going to work. But I do want to cover uh there's there's literally dozens and dozens of quantum properties and behaviors uh that that we call quantum that we observe with these quantum elementary particles. Uh but I do want to cover uh three or four of them that are relevant today to our discussion and to quantum computers in particular superposition entanglement and coherence and decoherence.

[00:18:06]uh traditional bits in a classical computer, binary computer, bits are binary digits. In a classical computer, you can have all kinds of bits, but each and each bit can be a one or a zero.

[00:18:19]Binary digit can be a one or a zero. Uh and if you give me three bits, each bit uh in the three bits can be a one or a zero. What that means is that you can actually have a total of eight different combinations from 00 0 all the way to 111 and everything else in between. So even though three bits can represent uh an eight different threebit states again from 0000 to 111 at any one time it's only being one of those eight combinations.

[00:18:52]Uh that's in traditional binary computers. Well, quantum bits or cubits we're going to see in a minute is exponentially more powerful than that.

[00:19:01]But to understand that, you have to understand a quantum property known as superp position. And you almost is it when I say it, it's going to sound weird. You almost just have to memorize it. But just know uh that a quantum answer, a quantum state is always all the possible answers or states. So, uh, to give this analogy, if you, if I was going to ask you, and again, I'm just kind of making up an analogy that doesn't really fit at the quantum level, but just to try to make it a little bit understandable. If you were to ask me, is that cat white or black? When it's in its quantum state, that cat would be both white and black and everything in between. Be white and black at the same time, everything in between. If you were to ask the famous Schroinger's cat a question, is that cat dead or alive? If you've ever heard of that, that cat is both dead and alive at the same time and really everything in between. You know, if I was to ask you is that what is that if you toss that coin is going to land on heads or tails? Well, if that coin was a quantum particle in a state of superp position, it could be that that it is heads and tails and everything else in between all at once. And again, this is so strange if you've been introduced to it for the first time. So, I just tell you it's probably best just to memorize it that when we have a quantum particle or a quantum answer, a quantum state that is uh, you know, when it's in its quantum state and there's possible answers for it, it's got to be a possible answer out of that. You like, is the cat white or black? It's not all of a sudden going to be pink or something like that. So, it's got to be a possible answer, but it's all the possible answers all at the same time, at least until you measure it. So in a quantum computer device when you have a cubit uh let's say that we have cu three cubits uh again like three bits with three quantum bits three cubits and they're in superp position you actually get all eight states all at the same time. You give me three bits in superp position and each of those bits can still only be a one or a zero, but because they can be a one or a zero all at the same time and really in everything in between, but we'll just go with a one or a zero all at the same time. Uh you end up having the exponential power that those three cubits can represent eight different states all at the same time. It's exponentially more powerful than a bit.

[00:21:20]And uh at least until you measure when you measure it, it then becomes these three bits cl we'd say classical bits forever more. But while they're in the quantum states, they're actually all the possible answers all at the same time.

[00:21:32]And it gives it a lot of uh power. This superp position, matter of fact, if you give us about a thousand cubits or something like that, it's exponentially so powerful you can store all information created by mankind until now. At least until now. uh you know so a lot of information can be stored on a thousand cubits and it does look like we're pretty soon going to have within you know a handful of years have millions of cubits we're getting ready to have uh a lot of cubits that can store a lot of exponential exponentially store a lot a lot a lot a lot of information and it's going to allow us to solve some problems that were previously thought to be unsolvable a whole lot more efficiently. Uh another uh quantum property you may hear about is entanglement. Uh and this is the idea that whenever two quantum particles get near each other, they can or will entangle. Meaning that what happens when they get around each other is that they will all of a sudden start to operate as if they're one system together. Uh and I'm going to simplify this uh saying that you know like if one turns right, the other turns right at the same time.

[00:22:44]they can no longer be considered separate systems. And entanglement is one of the most um one of the most natural things that that happens in the world. Like right now at the end of my finger, photons and electrons are entangling by the trillions a second with the end of my finger. And and these these photons and electrons actually don't touch each other, but they get near each other and then they actually go off to other sides of the universe at the speed of light. Near the speed of light. Nothing can travel at the speed of light, but near the speed of light.

[00:23:14]That's what the speed electrons and photons move at. Uh, and they are now connected as a single system. And what one does the other will do or at least be correlated to it in some way. And so this is here's kind of a a quick little video to kind of demonstrate entanglement.

[00:23:39]So again once they you know once they entangle they will now kind of operate just like each other. Uh and and let me say that uh Nils Boore who was an early early uh discoverer of quantum physics.

[00:23:51]Uh he's considered kind of the father of modern day uh quantum physics said those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it. Uh and he understood it better than most. Although I like author C. Clark's definition, which is any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, which is what a lot of people think quantum physics is today. Although it's nope, it's just the way the world works. So, what is quantum computing? Well, just know that again with quantum computing, these cubits can be represented by any quantum particle, although they're typically electrons or photons. uh today but most computer manufacturers quantum computer manufacturers are not using quarks and nutrinos and things like that. Uh they're using electrons or photons and it's really whether that electron or photon is has a particular property type of property like is it moving right or moving left. Is it spinning right? Is it spinning left? Is it spinning up? Is it spinning down?

[00:24:48]Does it have a particular polarization?

[00:24:50]Is it right polarization or left polarization? So the quantum computer manufacturer will choose a particular quantum particle uh and say that the the property of that particle like is it spinning right we'll make it a one if it's spinning left we'll make it a zero or something like that that's kind of how the basics of how you make a quantum device or quantum computer. So how to make a quantum computer? Again, you have to pick the quantum particle and properties you want to represent the ones or zeros in your system. So ones that you think you're capable of creating. Again, usually electrons or photons. And many times it's the polarization or the spins of it. They become the cubits of the system. Then your quantum computer has to create those cubits when they need to use them and entangle them with each other so that they can have that superp position that power and efficiency and exponential power of the superp position and they need to be protected against uh outside interference outside unwanted entanglement. We'll talk about that more in just a second. And then you use those cubits to create logic aids. I don't know you know who here took uh computer science or had a class in computers but uh regular computers have they work using bits and what's called these and or or not gates uh which are these logical gates that if I put a a bit in there that's like one one and one does it become a one at the end on the output of the logic gate or does it does one and one make a zero on the output well it depends on whether you're using and ors or not gates well you're doing the same thing with quantum computers uh you using sort of the same types of gates and even some more types in there to and you try to get you try to arrange those logic gates in a way so that they'll solve a particular problem. Typically, you're using these logic gates and sometimes you need millions or billions of these logic gates to represent uh particular algorithms and mathematical solutions to solve particular types of problems. and then they will manipulate the ones and zeros of your cubits and superp position to come out with a particular uh solution in there. Uh so then you tell that quantum computer to again create those cubits, create these quantum gates that represent different types of problems you're trying to solve and then you run those cubits through those uh quantum gates and algorithms to solve particular problems and you measure the final state of those gates and registers uh when the program finishes. And that's how you kind of solve something. That's how you you make a quantum computer at least logically uh when you're trying to do it and trying to get some sort of quantum answer answer from these quantum uh cubits that you're using. And let me say today we have lots of quantum computers and quantum processors uh and and CPUs and we've had lots of quantum devices available since at least 2000s. We've had quantum computers since 1998 1999.

[00:27:42]Uh you may see some of these quantum computers especially from IBM and others that have all these copper coils going down there that these those are the super super chilled coolant that are trying to keep the cubits super cooled like -460 Fahrenheit what's called near zero Kelvin uh when and they're trying to prevent that unwanted interference.

[00:28:04]So they create the cubits they super cool them and it makes the cubits stay more stable and what we call cohhere.

[00:28:10]talk more about that in a minute. Uh and so that they can get it get those cubits to do useful things without this unwanted outside interference. Uh D-Wave has been selling quantum computers uh millions and tens of millions of dollars quantum computers for at least a decade and a half. Uh you know IBM has them uh Amazon has them, Google has them, Microsoft has them. Uh and you can you can you again can buy other types of quantum devices and have been able to for decades in some cases. The first working quantum computer which was just two cubits came in 1998 1999 and today though uh we started to have uh quantum computers with a th00and cubits or 148 cubits I think there's even a 496-bit cubit computer by D-Wave.

[00:28:58]uh in 1999, Google is the first to announce that they were able to accomplish with a quantum computer, a very kind of early stage quantum computer uh to accomplish and solve some problems that could not have been solved anywhere nearly as easy with a traditional computer. So, a lot of times you'll hear that quantum computers aren't doing anything else and they don't have the power of your wristwatch and that sort of stuff. Let me say that's kind of true. Most quantum computers are not that powerful yet. But we do have many quantum computers that are far more powerful than anything that a traditional computer that any number of traditional computer you put all the traditional computers in the world today together and they could not do what some of the quantum computers are doing. Uh and today in in 2026 as I'm giving this talk uh again there's a lot of different types of quantum computers with over a thousand cubits up to 4,000 over 4,000 cubits although most of them are known as eneing computers and they're not they're not the ones that are going to be cracking the cryptography uh that we're worried about today. Uh but there's a lot of the computers that can crack today's cryptography uh are getting ready to break today's cryptography that have 128 cubits or you know maybe 64 to 168 maybe a little bit and we're going to see uh more and more of these uh quantum computers that can break cryptography starting to have two 300 even 10,000 cubits uh within the next year or two. Uh and let me say but several uh quantum computing vendors are predicting predicting many thousands of cubits by 2029.

[00:30:27]uh and that's kind of a very uh you know very pinnacle date and uh you know when do you have to be prepared for these these Qday attacks really you should be prepared by 2029 because of that again the uh quantum computers that uh we have right now that have thousands of cubits or this type called like D-wave cells is called a kneeling and they they aren't the type of computers that are great at breaking crypto. The type of quantum computers that are great at breaking break breaking crypto are called universal uh gate uh quantum computers and they're much better at breaking crypto. And universal gate just means that it's a universal computer kind of like your your laptop or any computer you're using today. Can do a lot of different things. It's considered universal or universal gate versus a calculator. If you had a calculator, it would only be really good at being at doing math, right? or your wristwatch or something like that may be only good at you know doing the time or doing a date or something like that. These this is a computing device but it's not universal.

[00:31:28]It's dedicated to a particular thing.

[00:31:30]Well universal gate quantum computers are just quantum computers that can do lots of things. You can rearrange those quantum gates in lots of different ways.

[00:31:39]And again, I think the highest number of cubits we know about in a uh a quantum a universal gay quantum computer is over a thousand, although most of them are 128 bits or less. And that's important because we we need somewhere uh people think between uh uh somewhere between 8 and 10,000 uh stable cubits in order to break today's crypto. Uh somewhere in there. So, we're we're starting to get there, get very close to that. And let me say that again uh you know one of the big problems is that we have to keep when when quantum computing vendors uh are have a uh uh have these cubits in them uh that are uh entangled and in superp position. the the computer vends to grade these bits uh you know to represent the zeros and ones and again entangle them and put them in superp position but they don't want outside interference and entanglement other electrons and and photons are always constantly trying to get to the photons and electrons that are being used in these quantum computers but they don't want it they want to keep those cubits with unwanted they don't want it to they don't want it to have unwanted entanglement and when They don't have these unwanted entanglements from outside the system. It's these those cubits are considered co cohered or incoherence, right? They're working together to solve a particular problem. But again, uh you know these nature na naturally nature is always trying to entangle with it which would be a bad thing. And so vendors try all kinds of things to prevent unwanted entanglement with the cubits that they create using that super cooling again where they'll try to cool the cubits down to -460 Fahrenheit or things called ion traps or using lasers to kind of suspend them in the air but keep these unwanted entanglements from happening.

[00:33:36]Uh they could be using magnetism of some sort or some heavy shielding again to try to block the electrons and photons from outside the system from getting in there. And again while the system while these cubits in a computing a quantum computing device are free of unwanted entanglements, we say the cubits are cohered. And in order for quantum computers to solve problems, they need their cubits to stay cohered long enough to solve the desired problems, which you know could be many many seconds or or much much longer. It could be days or weeks in some cases. So and and and nature is always trying to get at these cubits and decoher them. Uh decoherence is when you know some you know uh some photon or electron comes into that coherent system you know impacts it entangles with it and then goes away with it. And what happens is that now that that uh that you know newly unwanted entanglement happens and it's now flying across the universe at the speed of light. If it changes it changes all the cohered it also changes all the cohered uh cubits inside the system with unwanted uh coherence. So maybe like this you have this you know cubid come in entangle with what you want to be uh you know a coherent cubit and then it it flies off the other side of the universe gets entangled with other cubits and they end up changing the cubit in the system that you didn't want to change. Uh this is known as decoherence. Again, when you have unwanted entanglements and you have these cubits that come in and then fly across the other side of the universe and then if something impacts and entangles with them and changes it, well, it's going to change the cubit that you wanted to stay cohered within your system. And this is the number one challenge facing quantum computer vendors is to keep unwanted entanglements out of their system to keep their their their cubits that they want to use their entangle superp position cubits entangled long enough to solve a particular problem without any unwanted entanglements that could change and have an impact upon the uh answer that they were trying or problem they were trying to solve. So you want your cubits to be cohered and keep away the unwanted uh decoherence, unwanted entanglement and decoherence in there.

[00:35:58]Uh and to do that what most uh quantum computer vendors do today is they use these they use uh called quantum error correction. they uh it's really hard to make a one for one for one stable cohered uh long enough logical they call logical cubits that stay cohered long enough uh not to be have these unwanted entanglements. So what most vendors do today is surround each of their logical cubits with a bunch of ancillary error correcting cubits. And and sometimes they may need to surround the working logical cubit with thousands to millions of ancillary error correcting cubits that help keep that logical cubit straight. uh and you know so even if it does have an unwanted um entanglement or something like that or decoheres the error correcting ancillary cubits will make sure that it maintains its right cohered state and here's kind of a graphic representing that yeah simple very very simple graphic kind of representing that uh and it's you know I'm I'm really glossing over a lot of the details there But uh most quantum computers have lots and lots of ancillary cubits uh to make one logical cubit. But the number of stable logical cubits is increasing over time. Here is a a road map from probably one of the largest uh probably probably easily the largest uh dedicated quantum computing vendor ion. Uh you can even buy their stock on the stock market there. Uh but you can see that they think over time like this year they think they're going to have from 100 to 256. So, they already have 100, as I'm speaking, they have 128 bit cubit uh quantum computer, and they're probably going to have something closer to 256 uh physical cubits, and they expect to have 10,000 uh uh physical cubits next year, but you can see that the the logical cubits are less, right? So, next year they expect to have 10,000 physical cubits, but a lot of those are ancillary cubits. So, they think that it will end up only being about 800 uh logical cubits. And you can see the progression.

[00:38:12]They think by, you know, 2029 they're going to have computers of 200,000 uh physical cubits that will equate to about 8,000 logical cubits. And again, to start breaking today's uh cryptography, especially start uh ECC, elliptic curve cryptography, the key size about 384 bits is a pretty typical one. They think somewhere between a,000 and 8,000 cubits will be enough to break ECC. Maybe 10,000 cubits would all all you need. uh but certainly by the time we think we get to about 8 to 10,000 logical cubits uh error corrected cubits where there you have the logical cubits working there that uh we will be able to you know Q day will will come about and you can see that it looks very likely if if ion is being uh on the road map here uh and let me say having a certain number of cubits and logical cubits isn't the only thing they have to do they have to have what's called low error rates and and long gate fidelity and lots of other things. Uh but the the uh having your your logical cubits cohered long enough to solve a problem is really one of the biggest challenges biggest remaining challenges in the quantum computer world. So it does look like according to ion Q that we're going to start having uh quantum computers at least from them uh at least by 2029 2030 or something like that or within you know a year or two of that and that's why a lot of the vendors like Google and and Cloudflare and Microsoft stuffs have started to say hey you need to be prepared by 20 would be my guess let me say today we already have lots of quantum devices we're working hard to get more cryptographically relevant quantum computers but we have had quantum computers since 1998 and we have quantum microprocessors and people buy them. We've had quantum programming languages and development kits and compilers. There's cloud connected quantum computers you can play with from Microsoft and IBM and many others. We've had a quantum key distribution system since 2000 uh by ID Quantique uh although they've been they got bought up by Q. But um quantum key distribution systems allow you to securely transfer other uh encryption keys that might otherwise be intercepted and broken by quantum systems by qu sufficiently capable quantum systems. uh QKD allows you to securely transmit those keys across your network from end to end in a quantum resistant way and that's known as quantum key distribution. So it's for transmitting other encryption keys securely across network nodes. uh quantum random number generators. If you didn't know this, uh before quantum, no random number generator was truly random. And that's because before quantum, all random number generators have a what's called a source of truth or a source of measurement. That's some sort of vibrating chip, uh quartz or something else where it actually vibrates at a preset even number of cycles per second, like 26 million times per second. uh uh and because it's an even number of seconds always that means that the quantum random number I'm sorry the nonqu quantum random number generators are not truly random because their source of trust their origin of you know their origin is non-random but quantum random number generators are truly random and you you will see over time that all random number generators become quantum random number generators uh we've already got a bunch of quantum networks around the world a lot of metropolitan an area quantum networks around the world mostly I'd say in the US and China and the UK we even had quantum quantum satellite networking although the they apparently only work during the day I'm sorry work at night they don't work during the day the quantum satellites uh but a lot of quantum networks all around I'm even in the great state of Florida and they they're connecting a lot of their colleges using quantum based metropolitan area networks we have quantum cryptography the cryptography that you'll keep hearing that you need to switch to the postquantum cryptography is not quantum cryptography. Postquantum cryptography is just regular uh binary classical cryptography that is not susceptible to quantum computer attack. But one day we will have quantum cryptography. Uh which is uh you need quantum computers, quantum memory and quantum devices and all that for that. Uh but that is considered unbreakable. Supposedly quantum cryptography is unbreakable uh cryptographer. at least you can uh eaves drop on it cuz if you eaves drop on it you change it. Uh and then we also already have quantum imaging and quantum sensors and things like that that are used around the world. Uh if you get an MRI uh that's actually working that's quantum imaging already. Uh we have quantum sensors all around the world. Uh even being used in war today. Uh a lot of times with these uh different ships and submarines stuff go fight a war the adversary shuts off GPS. So these ships and submarines and missiles wouldn't know where they are. And so they actually have quantum sensors that are able to without using uh GPS can figure out where these things are to a great deal of accuracy. So there really are uh you know hundreds and hundreds of quantum devices that we have had and used and you can buy and going forward we're going to get more and more and more. What we don't have really is cryptographically relevant sufficiently capable quantum computers. That's what we're kind kind of trying to work through today. But so what will we get when we have sufficiently capable quantum computers? Well, not only breaking encryption uh but also basically new understanding of physics in our universe because it's really how everything works. And before we have quantum computers, we can't really model in a computer how h how the universe really works. So only with quantum computers can we truly model how the real universe works. Uh it's going to be able to solve many complicated math problems very quickly. It's going to give us incredible precision uh military precision, weather precision traffic.

[00:44:03]We're going to have uh like for weather.

[00:44:05]I live in Florida and every year we get all these hurricanes coming this way and they always have the hurricane either hitting the uh the right or the west or the east coast of Florida, but they don't, you know, as they get ready to hit Florida, they don't tell you like it's like the cone of where it's going to hit becomes this multiund mile cone.

[00:44:22]And I live in Tampa and lately every time a hurricane heads this way, we don't know like are we supposed to flee right, flee left, do we stay, we go north, we go south, where do we go?

[00:44:32]Well, quantum computer is going to allow us to uh just have a line that talks about exactly where that hurricane is going to hit. It's going to allow us to have not only self-driving cars, but be able to manage all of millions and millions of self-driving cars that never stop between source and destination. No more stop signs and traffic lights and stuff. They're just going to speed up and slow down and take turns as needed to interlace all the needed traffic.

[00:44:55]That's going to be wonderful to decrease pollution. We're going to have better medicines, better chemicals, better solar cells, better better chemicals, uh better batteries, uh anything. It's going to improve all sorts of stuff and it's going to give us true better artificial intelligence. There actually are quantum based machine learning algorithms that are just waiting for us to get sufficiently capable quantum computers and then we'll be able to have even better artificial intelligence than we have today. And hopefully that artificial intelligence intelligence can then help us have better quantum computers and solve some of the remaining mysteries uh that we have in quantum physics. And let me just say a whole bunch of things we cannot imagine right now. uh quantum is is going to be as paradigm changing as the internet was as AI was. That's what quantum is going to do. So there's gonna be lots of things we cannot imagine. And unfortunately, at least for the next 5 years, the biggest thing we need to worry about is it breaking most traditional public key crypto and some of those every uh some of the other types of cryptography and every secret it protects. Although remember eventually I think 1015 years from now, we're all going to be using unbreakable quantum encryption which would be pretty cool. So, how does quantum how does sufficiently capable cryptographically relevant uh quantum computers break today's crypto? Well, let me give you a couple of examples. If we were taking all the possible combinations that you might have on a chessboard, a chessboard has 32 black and 32 white squares. We would cryptographically represent that or mathematically represent that as 2 to the 64. So, there's 2 to the 64 possible moves that you could make on a chessboard. If we were not using chess rules, we're just saying what are all the possible combinations you could ever make in a chess board. We would represent that mathematically as 2 to the 64. Uh and if each option was represented by a grain of rice, the then the grain of rice added all together would be as high as Mount Everest. And today's crypto like elliptic curve cryptography is 2 to the 384.

[00:46:51]RSA is often uh 148 bits. So 2 to the48 bit. So that would be two thou you know that'd be a whole lot of Mount Everest grains of rice there. Uh and and really ultimately to brute force factor a 4096bit prime number equation and I'm going to explain those terms prime number equation and factor uh in just a second.

[00:47:15]But if we were trying to basically break a uh let's say RSA 4,96bit uh key, it would take more guesses than the known atoms in the known universe.

[00:47:29]Uh you'll have some people think, well, can't we get to get a bunch of cloud computers hooked together? Can't we take all the cloud computers at Microsoft and all the cloud computers at AWS, all the cloud computers at Google, put them all together and and break that number factor that that large prime number? No, there are not enough atoms in the known universe to do that. Not enough energy.

[00:47:49]You don't have enough atoms to make the hard drive, the hardware, the memory, the storage space, the CPUs that you would need. Just isn't isn't enough. So, a conventional computer cannot factor these large prime number equations that are involved in today's asymmetric cryptography. And again, I'll go that I'll do that in a minute. Conventional computers just can't do it. They cannot factor these large equations, numbers this large without a shortcut trick.

[00:48:17]Well, quantum is that shortcut. Quantum can do uh factor large prime number equations in seconds to minutes. That superp position we talked about allows it to do it. But let's go back into how does crypto how does quantum break public key crypto today. Most public key crypto relies upon large prime numbers.

[00:48:38]A prime number is any whole number after one that can only be divided by itself and one to get a whole number instead of a fraction. So those are like the numbers 3 5 7 11 131 17 and so on and so on and so on. Uh much of today's public key encryption asymmetric encryption like RSA and Diffy Helman and stuff like that are based on the idea that if I take two large prime numbers multiply them together and get a result that result we call n. uh if I hand anyone in uh and let me say that that would be like the outcome of your encrypted zip file or your the outcome of something you've encrypted with RSA or defy helmet or whatever that would be n. If I hand people the the result the n and then again that's a result of of multiplying these two large prime numbers together.

[00:49:24]Uh there isn't enough computing power to figure out what two large prime numbers trying to figure out what two large prime numbers made up n is known as factoring. trying to factor back to the original prime numbers that were multiplied together is known as factoring or factoring large prime number equations. So most of our encryption is based on the idea that if I give you n you and every computer you have cannot figure out p and q the two large prime numbers that were used to create n. To give you kind of a simple example what two prime numbers when multiplied together equal 15 if we had 15 as n. Well that's a really easy one that even I can solve. It's 3 * 5, right? Uh those are the two prime numbers when multiply together give you 15. But suppose I g said, "Hey, N is 187. What's P and Q?" Well, you know, I can't do that off the top of my head right away in an instant like I could 15. But hey, give me a piece of paper or a calculator or something, a computer. I can probably figure out what those two prime numbers are. And if you did it, you'd see that they're 17 and 11. But what if I made it really big? What if P and Q multiplied by each other gave you 84 million plus? What's P and Q? Well, then you are going to you are probably not going to be able to do it. And if you had a computer that was try just trying to brute force it or whatever, it could probably do it, but it's not simple. It's starting to be something that can be protective, right? Well, in today's cryptography, and by the way, there's the answer of the 84 million. uh 9,511 * 88887 will give you the 84 million number. But suppose I gave you a 4096-bit number. A 4096 bit number is 1,234 decimal digits long and I just picked a random one and put it on your screen. That's a really really big number especially when you start putting commas in it, right? Uh a traditional computers uh are not good at figuring out very large ends. they cannot factor back to the two original large prime numbers uh that created that very large,234digit uh n uh and sometimes the keys themselves uh the the public or the private key can be that big. Uh traditional computers cannot figure it out. There's just not enough uh you know guesses enough energy and and takes more guesses than all the known atoms in the known universe. Just can't be done with a traditional binary computer. Uh but back in 1994, Peter Shore, and this is before we even had a quantum computer, we weren't even sure quantum computers were exactly possible, but Peter Shore back in 1994 said, "Hey, if you give me the property of superposition where I can create these cubits that have all this exponential power, I can put all the possible answers in there and figure it out." So that's what and I'm going to try to explain to you very simply Shor's algorithm and I think it's going to be the simplest explanation you have ever heard. So if you don't understand this explanation, you will not understand any other explanation. But Peter Shore said, "Hey, if you give me enough superposition stable cubits that I can store all the possible answer, remember superposition says the answer is all possible uh answers." Uh so Peter Shore said if you gave me enough cubits and what he said at the time, I guess when it was calculated was about two to three times the number of cubits of the of the bit length. So if you were trying to break 2048 RSA 2048, you would need you know like uh two or three times plus one or two uh for management as a key length you wanted to break. So if you give them enough cubits, you can then put all the possible answers that could make up n. So that would be I'm just kind of making this up, but it' be like 1* 1 and then 1* 2 and 1* 3 and everything all the way up to 99999* 99999. you know all the possible answers that could be these large prime numbers that made n. Well, Peter Shore said, "Well, I can put that. You give me enough cubits and enough stable and tangled cubits in superp position, we can put all the possible answers for n."

[00:53:18]And then here's kind of the real trick.

[00:53:20]Using something called foyer transform converts those uh the p and q of each possible answer into a sine wave. Uh so a sine wave going, you know, up and down like this and then it combines them. And if the answer is wrong, the two sine waves that are combined, and if it's the wrong answer, when two sine waves are out of sync and they combine, they actually will make something smaller than double the height. You know, they hit and they don't make double the height. They end up uh kind of hitting and denigrating each other. But uh on a quantum computer, when you have two right answers and the two sine waves meet, it actually creates the highest possible sine wave out of all the answers. So that's what uh Shor's algorithm does. It puts all the possible answers in superp position uh cubits, converts all the possible answers to uh sine waves, combines them, and then it just tells the quantum computer find the tallest highest best sine wave. That's how it's done. That's how if given enough cubits and enough quantum logic gates that it can quickly solve what is unsolvable by traditional binary computers. Let me say um Peter Shor's algorithm is only going to be really relevant to us for the next 5 years uh why it breaks crypto. Within 5 years, you're going to be uh fully converted to postquantum cryptography or you won't be in business. You will not have you will not have privacy. You will not have protected information. But going forward, the algorithm that's probably going to play a bigger part in both attacks and defenses and inventions, something known as Grover's algorithm, which came a couple of years after Shor's algorithm. Basically the short uh the short state of that is that Grover's algorithm gives you a quadratic speed up for certain types of unordered searches.

[00:55:05]Uh and and and that and what this means is that an unordered search an ordered search is where you have an answer or a search space that is like 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 or abdg. Unordered search means the answers for all intents purposes are unordered and random looking. And it says that Grover's algorithm gives us a quadratic speed up when we're searching for these unordered uh these unordered searches and unordered answers. uh and and the outcome is the you know what it causes is that a lot of the protections we have the the symmetric key sizes the hashes uh passwords uh and password hashes it forces them to get double strong to stop to have the same strength uh because of the quadratic speed up I know that's a lot that's a mouthful but let me say this again the quadratic speed up of Grover's algorithm with sufficiently capable quantum computers means that uh If you want to have protective power of you know of symmetric encryption or hashes or a password or a password hash or something like that it needs to have uh double the protection. Uh so it so Grover's algorithm has the protection of let's say cryptographic asymmetric or symmetric keys like if you have AES 256bit key when Grover's algorithm is on a cryptographically relevant sufficiently capable quantum computer it it has the protective strength or it I'm sorry more than quadratically uh has the uh the strength of an AES key. uh it means that the AES uh because if you want to half the protection of an AES 256 bit key it only it needs 2550 it only needs to go to 255. If you want to double the strength of a 256 bit key AES key it only to be 257 that doubles the strength but the uh Grover's algorithm quadratically h you know weakens a key so that it needs to be double it double the size. So again, if you have an AES 256-bit key, once we have cryptographically relevant computers using Grover's algorithm, that same AES 256-bit key has the protective power of AES 128. And if you have an AES 128 bit key today, that means it would have the uh protective power of AES with 64-bit key, which is not protective at all. Uh but uh Grover's algorithm is going to be what gives us all solves all sorts of problems is already solving all sorts of problems. It's what's going to give us better traffic uh you know avoidance and better precision and better chemicals, better medicine, better batteries and all that sort of stuff and and vendors are using it already today to solve logistical problems and chemical problems and things like that. That Grover's Peter Shor's algorithm is only going to be relevant to us for probably five years as it breaks crypto. that eventually we're all going to get protected against it. And it's really Grover's algorithm that we're both going to use for many great inventions, but also be fighting against the threats uh from Grover's algorithm. So, how long till quantum computers break public key cryptography? Bottom line is we don't know. um the US government 10 years ago or 8 years ago or something like that estimated that it was going to be between 2030 and 2035 and that that US agencies and companies should be fully uh prepared for Qday. Uh and and they're saying you need to be postquantum prepared by 2035. Uh I don't know why the US government's not updating that date. Uh because Google and Cloudflare and IMQ and many others think that we're going to be to the Q day by 2029 2030.

[00:58:43]Google, Cloudflare, Microsoft, they're saying they're going to be prepar postquantum prepared by 2029. That means you should be you should not wait for 2035. US government says you have till 2035. That would be taking a very large risk. Uh we have some even some governments like India and Australia and stuff say that the critical infrastructure has to be prepared by 2027. We're talking as I talk now just months away. Uh so uh you need to I think out of this just to be safe. The smart money is going to say that you should be we don't know when Qday will happen but the smart money says you should be prepared in 2029 for some type of cryptographic break happening in 2030. And again the risk of it happening before then uh is higher than it's ever been and getting higher every single day. So how can you be prepared for the coming con and Q break Q day? That's why y'all came here. This is what I say here. You need to make sure that you educate senior management and all your staff about what this quantum Q day is and why you need to prepare. If you have not started an official uh postquantum project with executive management support and uh and a dedicated leader and resources and budget, you need to start one. Now, if you're listening to me today and your organization does not have an official postquantum project launch, you need to go back and launch one. uh and in my book that I mentioned early on that you can download for free.

[01:00:07]It even has like a two-page letter in it that you can take to you can edit, copy, edit, paste it to executive management about how you know tell them about what's happening with the postquantum project, what you need to do to prepare.

[01:00:17]You need to take a data protection inventory which means looking at all first of all you got to figure out where is all your critical data stored. What critical data do you need to protect past a couple of years and then what is the net effect of all the hardware and software encryption that protects it? So what is the protection that's on in this case let's say a laptop and on the TPM chip that protects it and what's in Windows and what's in the application that's running on Windows or the service. What is all the what is the net effect of that encryption? What is the weakest part of that encryption? What is the the most strongest encryption you can insert? What's the largest key size that you can configure it to be without having to replace it or get rid of it?

[01:00:59]That is your data protection inventory.

[01:01:02]That stage, stage three, is going to take uh a year or two for most organizations. This is the reason why you need to start your postquantum project now if you haven't already started it. And then you'll analyze and figure out, okay, what do what can I configure and upgrade? What do I need to install? What do I need to get new? What do I need to delete? What do I need to replace? Uh and then you need to implement all your postquantum mitigations. Let me say here's the eight postquantum mitigations that are possibilities for everyone. Uh I don't think any other presentation any other person has these eight. This the most inclusive list you'll find anywhere. Uh most of them only have three or four. I have eight. First of all, delete any unneeded data. The best protection you can give data is to delete it if you don't need it. Uh you need to physically isolate your networks and your devices today. If you're worried about someone eavesdropping on them, if you have critical data today that you think someone may be able to eve drop on and take, you have what's called harvest now decrypt later attacks. This is the idea that uh your adversary your competitor could be easedropping on your networks or trying to find your encrypted hard drives or encrypted you know thumb drives or something like that and maybe they don't have quantum sufficiently capable quantum computers today but when they have access to that service maybe they decrypt your data then it's known as harvest now decrypt later attacks uh the uh NIST and the NSA has warned that uh our adversaries uh like China and Russia are already doing that they're literally recording people's data and sniffing on wireless networks and stuff waiting for the day when they can decrypt these secrets if they haven't already done it. Um, and uh, let me say I think the US government and NSA are sniffing plenty of data themselves. It's everybody against everybody. But if you think that your company uh, today would be a target against an adversary, a competitor that might be sniffing your data, you need to physically isolate your data so it cannot be easedropped on. Uh, you need to strengthen all your symmetric key sizes to 220 uh, 256 bits or more. And most people are using AES for the symmetric encryption. So most people's AES uh symmetric keys are already 256 bits, but if you have any 128 bits lying around, you need to increase 256 bits. Uh you need to also implement postquantum cryptography.

[01:03:09]We're going to cover that in the next slide. There's a bunch of different cryptography nist says you should use the RSA and Diffy Helman and Elgal and all that stuff. Uh enable quantum buy and enable quantum key distribution if you want to use that across your networks. uh we're going to see a lot of hybrid defenses which is traditional crypto plus postquantum cryptography being used. Uh if you have a if you're using a regular browser today like Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge or Apple Safari or something a lot of the connections that it's making to servers around the world are already using this hybrid defense again which is this combination of traditional uh cryptography plus postquantum cryptography using uh MLKM which we'll talk about in the next slide. Uh also eventually in you know 10 or 15 years when we have quantum cryptography and quantum devices and quantum network cards and all this stuff we want to be using quantum cryptography. Remember postquantum cryptography is not quantum cryptography. Quantum cryptography requires quantum devices quantum memory and all that sort of stuff. Uh and then you need to uh change from random number generators to quantum random number generators whenever you can. There are already devices in the world like there's some I think some cell phones in Taiwan that are already using quantum random number generators and you can buy them and you can connect to them over the internet and stuff like that.

[01:04:23]Eventually one day all random number generators will be quantum random number generators and you should use them when they become generally available and cost effective. Um certainly the US government NIST wants you to upgrade all of your quantum susceptible cryptography to the new postquantum cryptography PQC standards. Uh the most common one most people will be dealing with is that that top one there module latticebased key encapsulation mechanism that's abbreviated as MLKM.

[01:04:52]Uh the algorithm that was used to create that that was submitted to the NIS contest years ago was known as Crystal Crystals Kyber. Uh, as a matter of fact, I love the idea that two of the postquantum standards, Crystals Kyber and Crystal Stythium, are actually names lifted from Star Trek and Star Wars. And I love that cryptographic nerds uh, love science fiction movies and they name their algorithms after Star Wars and Star Trek. But just know NIST is not using them. They're using the more exciting name of MLKM. Uh so if you've got RSA, Diffy Helman, Elgamal, elliptic curve cryptography, that sort of stuff, you're going to need to convert it to the MLKM and some of the other and other cryptography used for digital signatures and hashes and things like that. Uh the probably what's a lot of those things that have the ML in front of them or module lattice. And it turned out uh the NSA was worried that some crypto future cryptographers may be good at breaking module lattice based math. And so they created another uh one that was called HQC, the Hamming Quasi cycle that doesn't use module lattice-based math.

[01:05:57]And so that's one that you may use one day. But they recommend you use the Crystal's Kyber first and only use the HQC if it turns out the Crystal's Kyber is not as protective as they thought.

[01:06:07]And anyways, there's some other ones there that you may use. You got a choice of three of them uh to use for your digital signature algorithms and and and hashes and things like that. So just know this is going to be probably the bulk of what you're doing is again converting and let me say all the all the cloud vendors all the big cloud vendors like Google and Microsoft and Salesforce and Cloudflare and all they're going to they're going to be postquantum converted by 2029 you're not having to worry about that. The heavy lift for all of this is on premises in your environment and the small vendors that haven't even heard of this most of the people listening to this today have not known about this problem. Uh most vendors don't know about this problem.

[01:06:43]So uh this is you know the heavy lift in your environment is going to be all this software. A lot of people have software and hardware in their environment. They have no idea of what encryption or cryptography uses. You know the person that made that software no longer works at the company maybe is dead. Uh that the hard part is going to be all that on premises stuff. That's where most people's time and effort and focus is probably going to be or the smaller cloud vendors that really aren't as sophisticated as the big guys. Uh so again preparing for Qday besides creating a postconquer project you want to locate and identify and figure out what where your critical data is determine the useful life and it needs to live past you know be protected past a couple of years past 2030. Uh you need to get it postquantum protected figure out what it needs to be done what needs to be replaced what needs to be updated that sort of stuff and then document it.

[01:07:29]That is your Qday postquantum project.

[01:07:32]Uh and again preparing for this education, you can use the slide deck.

[01:07:35]You can send other people this conversation. You can send people links to to free copies of my book. Send it to your people in your company. Send it to your friends. Uh send it to your vendor.

[01:07:43]Send it to your third parties. You need to take a data protection inventory. You need to get on that today. Uh and then going forward, try to use quantum resistant encryption wherever you can.

[01:07:54]If you have purchasing contracts or you're buying stuff, make sure the purchasing contracts are asking those vendors either, are you postquantum prepared or what are you doing to be postquantum prepared? And let me tell you from experience, I've been through I've helped people with hundreds of cryptographic migrations. It's going to be a lot of vendors, a lot of people going, what do you mean postquantum? Uh they they do the same thing. I'd ask them, hey, what are you doing to be Shaw 2 prepared when we're moving from Shaw one to Shaw 2? And they're like, what do you mean Shaw 2? So, a big part of your process is going to be making your your vendors and third parties and suppliers and stuff like that aware of what postquantum means. And you want your purchasing contracts to have a question in there to ask when you're getting ready to buy software and hardware to ask those vendors, are you postquantum prepared? Because you don't want to be buying new software and hardware that you're just going to have to replace or upgrade later on. You want to stop the pain? Uh, and you at least want them your vendor to be crypto agile, have crypto agility. That means that you can update the cryptography used, let's say, from RSA to the MLKM without having to do a complete replace. Like if you use Windows, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft's going to send you a patch that can do that can replace and give you the right postquantum cryptography where it needs to be. If you're using a trusted platform module chip, TPM chip in your Windows laptop, uh TPM chips have been uh crypto agile since 2030, ever since they had TPM chip version 1.2. too. So you need to demand the same of your vendors that that if they are not postquantum uh use post quantum cryptography already that they need to be crypto agile so that they can update it when you need to before 2030. And again if you have high value data today that you need protected that may be susceptible to you have a competitor and adversary that is so motivated and capable you want to use physical isolation to protect them from eavesdropping on your data today. And again, you want a postquantum protection plan right now. If you don't have one operating, you're late. Start your official postquantum project now. And let me say, it's cheaper and better to do it now. It's going to be cheaper to do it. People that wait till the last minute are going to find out there's not a whole lot of available resources. The there right now there's hundreds of vendors that would love to help you with your postquantum mig migration and have tools to do it, but those resources are going to become more scarce and more expensive. And the longer you wait, the more uh pain it's going to be. I think there's going to be operational interruption for a lot of companies.

[01:10:16]This is going to be the biggest cryptographic migration, biggest IT project in many cases that most companies have ever faced and they're unbudgeted right now. And so the the sooner you start, the cheaper your project's going to be, the better decisions going to make, the bigger lead time you can give to your vendors uh to get crypto agile and to get postquantum prepared and even less legal risk.

[01:10:37]You're going to have less data that's going to leak and that sort of stuff.

[01:10:40]Also, I like to point out to people that uh because of Grover's algorithm, your password, I used to tell people your password needs to be 12 characters or longer if it's truly random or 20 characters or longer if it's a non-random password made up out of your head. Because of Gro Grover's algorithm uh and and quantum attacks uh and also AI, your password needs to be 25 characters or longer, whether it's random or not. Uh so I always recommend for a password policy that you use multiffactor authentication instead of passwords and choose fishing resistant multiffactor authentication like a yuba key uh like a phto enabled yuba key or something like that. If you uh have to use password you probably have to use passwords you should be using password manager that helps create and use passwords that are long and strong and unique for every website and service.

[01:11:28]And you if you must make a password up out of your heads it should be 25 characters or longer. Uh that that's my password policy there. I only have to remember one super long uh password.

[01:11:38]That's the password that I get into my laptop with and then my password manager handles all other passwords and I use multiffactor authentication and use fishing resistant multiffactor authentication whenever I can. Uh again, if you want to learn more about this, uh you can always go here and uh download my latest book, How AI and quantum impact cyber threats and defenses. It was just released a couple of months ago, but I have literally dozens if not a hundred free articles, quantum primers up on LinkedIn. go to my LinkedIn account and you can look up many many articles where I explain the same thing.

[01:12:08]So you don't have to buy my book. Lots of free stuff there. Uh also the you can go download the practical preparations for postquantum world. That was a document I was a major author for for the cloud security alliance which goes through a lot of this postquantum project stuff. Uh so again that's free for you there. If you want to if you want to learn more about quantum again I wrote more about quantum in my 2019 book called cryptography apocalypse. I hate that title, but Wy made that title, but that's all right. Uh, I talk a lot more about quantum. That whole book's about quantum and quantum computing. And the current book, AI and quantum, I teach quantum in a chapter in that book. It's the whole book. And again, here's other free free resources like in Wikipedia and YouTube and Amazon. Uh, if you go in there, just know that your head's when you're trying to learn about quantum quantum physics, quantum computers, your head's going to hurt a little bit.

[01:12:54]Everybody's does. And I just wish you more force. I say if you have any questions about this about quantum Qday and quantum computers and quantum physics and all that stuff you can feel free to send them to me at my email address roger gn noble.com again roger gnovfor.com you can always follow me on LinkedIn twitter messenger on YouTube or on blue sky uh but probably the you know it's e easiest to email me again at rogergno4.com and I post most of my articles on linkedin.com for sure and this video and other uh videos that I make will be posted on YouTube and at Nova before. Uh thanks a lot for putting up with me for the last uh hour and uh 161 17 minutes and it's been a pleasure and good luck being postquantum prepared.