Q-Day is Closer Than You Think: The Quantum Encryption Crisis

Hey guys, thanks for the intro. We're here with Rebecca Krauthamer, who is the CEO of QuSecure, and we're talking about, well, Quantum Day. It's today.

And everybody's talking about quantum, and it always brings us back to this conversation about Q-Day, but I'm just starting to wonder, are we going to be prepared for this? Because even when Q-Day arrives, and let's just randomly say it's 2029, well, I started working my way backwards from where we are, and I think there's roughly maybe 370 working days between now and then, and are we maybe going to be caught unawares by all of this? Anyway, Rebecca, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Mike. Thanks for having me. So what is your assessment in what's going on here?

Because ripping out encryption schemes is non-trivial. Yeah. " Google released a paper where Atomic released a paper, and these are earth-shattering, groundbreaking.

They both said, essentially, we figured out how to use quantum computers to break encryption effectively with a lot fewer resources than initially thought. And Google's moved their Q-Day to 2029 when they have to have their internal migration done. Cloudflare did the same.

And what we're seeing is a lot of organizations are following suit, and so there is this time crunch. If you do the math, right, that, yeah, it's 1,000 days total to get there, to 2029 from here, maybe. Maybe that.

Much fewer working days, as you said. But this is something that we've been thinking about. So we've been working in this space since 2019 because the world has known that, quote-unquote, "Q-Day" has been coming.

We've known this since 1994, and that it would likely happen in the next several years. And so when we started out, we started working with the Air Force, and it was a very clear picture of what today a typical organization looks like. A lot of investment and legacy infrastructure, and all of it needing to be upgraded to quantum-safe encryption.

So yes, huge overhaul. A huge amount of work that has to be done. And it is, I think, the biggest difference now after these papers have been released is that people are finally understanding that this is a non-negotiable priority.

So to your point about that, how are we going to get there? " So how much effort is there going to actually be in taking care of my legacy systems? Or am I just going to replace everything with something that's a little more post-quantum friendly, shall we say?

Well, that's certainly how some people think about it. And you'll see that at the government level in the US and in many parts of the world now, the migration timelines are fixed. " So after January 1st, 2027, you can't buy anything new, into national security, that doesn't support post-quantum.

So, yes, a lot of people are going to be prioritizing acquisition of new systems, and that those support post-quantum. But it is not responsible to be ignoring the legacy infrastructure because nobody is going to be gutting their entire infrastructure and turning it over in the next three years, right? And that's what we focused on, where we saw the biggest part of the challenge is these systems have to stay up and running, whether it's the Air Force or anywhere.

These systems cannot just be gutted in order to adopt post-quantum cryptography. And to take a step back, this problem really applies to any secure data in transit. Right?

That's where the biggest problem lives. And so you think about everything that goes into facilitating data as it travels. Chances are those come into play when you're thinking about this migration.

So that legacy infrastructure piece, that's where we spend most of our time. And how we have addressed that through the past few years is essentially control plane overlays for deploying encryption, decoupling that encryption from the asset itself, and deploying that encryption over the top in a way that does not impact performance, but gives you that control to not gut things, not throw things out with the bathwater, not have to overhaul systems, but adopt post-quantum protections immediately. So you're stopping that bleed and heading off that threat so you can get there sooner than 2029.

Is it reasonable to assume that I'm going to go in and replace the encryption schemes for all of my legacy systems? Or at this point, am I going to have to maybe start prioritizing some over others because I'm just not going to get there in time? It's a great question, and the answer isAt some point, we do have to do it all.

But the right way to do it is not think of it as you have to eat the whole elephant at once. It is the prioritization. That is the most important part.

And so, there is a very interesting bill that's being proposed as an amendment to the National Quantum Initiative Reauthorization Act right now, which is the big act that funds quantum computing research. But this is an amendment that says it's a forcing function to make government agencies pick one system, one high-priority system, that they need to put into production with PQC within 18 months of passing. And this is exactly how everybody, not just government, but everybody across private sector should be thinking about it is, what is that first system?

Pick one and just start moving, start migrating. And everything is interconnected, and that's why, ultimately, we have to do it all. And it's under Chatham House rules, but on one of the recent NIST calls, one of the leaders talked about it, saying, "Yes, of course, we have to do this migration as a whole.

We have to migrate everything. We do not do things because they are easy. " That was the statement.

And it is an incredibly big problem, and I think it intimidates a lot of people, but that is why we don't have to do it all at once. Mm-hmm. The starting with those initial systems is critical.

" Ask your board member, ask your CEO, your CISO, to close their eyes and imagine waking up and Q-day has happened, that cryptographically relevant quantum computers come online. And just ask them, kind of meditate on this, what does your mind first go to? What is the biggest thing that you're personally concerned about?

Maybe it's a personal email. Maybe it's all of your online banking customers. We worked on a report with Citibank that came out from Citi Institute about a month back, and we referenced some good econometric modeling that shows just one successful attack on one large US bank could cause losses to the tune of $2 to $3 trillion.

And so, yes, I think it's really hard for leaders to put themselves into that mindset of, oh, that is down the road, especially when in cybersecurity, everything kills you. There are so many fires burning at once. But the reality is, and I think what these new bombshell papers are forcing people to get into that mindset of, this could happen under my tenure.

This likely will. And so at a certain point, and that's going to come in the next year. " And that it's going to become too hard to ignore.

So to your earlier point, we've already moved the proverbial goalpost once to 2029. What are the odds that those goalposts are going to move again, maybe closer to 2028, and this is just the beginning of something? Because it seems like technology doesn't stand still here.

No. No, and to give you some bit of reference, we started working on this back in 2019, and around that time, the gold standard research said you needed something on the order of 20 million error-corrected qubits to break an RSA-2048 kind of thing. It doesn't matter what a qubit is, just 20 million of these units of quantum computing power, raw quantum computing power, to break RSA-2048.

Now, what these papers are saying is it's possible that under very specific circumstances and several months, you could do it with something on the order of 10,000. So going from 20 million to something on the order of 10,000 in just about five years, that's how much we have moved forward. So to your point, it is not only likely that new research will come out that accelerates the timelines, I think it's inevitable.

Well, Q-day sounds quaint, like there's going to be a party or something. But if and when this does happen, I don't think the people who are doing it or have this capability are going to stand up and necessarily announce that they have achieved this goal. They're going to have this capability for a certain amount of time before they let us know, and we might not figure it out for, I don't know, months, maybe a year or so.

So this Q-day thing, it's not like there's going to be an announcement, right? That is 100% accurate. One of the biggest dangers is that people are waiting for certainty.

When is this thing going to come online? Has it already broken? And we can't do that here, because, no, if you get this quantum computer, if you get this powerful of a tool, you do not release a press release.

Just like if we think back to World War II, when Alan Turing and crew were working on breaking the German Enigma code, and they figured it out, they went as far as risking lives and sacrificing human lives to keep it a secret, so that they could continue to have the upper hand. And that is what will happen. We won't know.

And data will be broken. Someone will have that master key to our communications. And it will be too late for some organizations.

Ultimately, what's your best advice to folks then? " Well, the news is always full of doom and gloom. And again, in cybersecurity, everything is on fire at all times.

It's not often that we have this big of a problem staring down at us, and we actually have a solution. And so the first thing that I see, too many people still think there is no way to solve for this problem, that it's panic mode that we have to stay in. Post-quantum cryptography exists.

It is standardized. It has the stamp of approval, go forth and adopt it, and it runs on classical infrastructure. You do not need to wait for quantum technology to fight quantum computer attacks.

So that's one big thing that we need to make sure everybody understands. We don't know when this is coming. Google is not even saying that 2029 is when it'll likely happen.

They're just saying there is a big enough threat that we know we need to migrate everything by 2029. We need to stop waiting for that certainty, because if we wait till something has gone wrong, something big has gone wrong. Something company-ending, something economy impacting, right?

So getting ahead of it, and I would say the main thing that organizations really should be doing and taking seriously is putting budgets very quickly towards not just discovering and inventorying across the organization where encryption lives, but also piloting. Pilot different solutions that actually remediate, that help migrate your systems to post-quantum. And finally, not just post-quantum, but what has become the gold standard way to approach this is post-quantum via cryptographic agility.

And this is the idea that these new standards will not live forever, whether it's the underlying math or specific implementations of these new post-quantum algorithms, they're not going to hold up forever. And so next time, as quantum moves faster and faster, as AI moves faster and faster, as threats become more dynamic, there needs to be a way to switch out the encryption that we use as quickly as those threats emerge. So no longer can we live in a world where you have to go through this huge migration every single time.

And that is cryptographic agility. We see organizations spending a lot of time in the discovery phase and thinking that you have to go through this exhaustive process before you do any of the remediation. You should be doing both at the same time.

You should immediately pilot, you should put a helmet on while we're hurtling towards this brick wall, and then you can progressively put on the suit of armor. And you should start prioritizing those systems and adopting post-quantum in a crypto-agile way. Well, speaking of that hurtling, have you seen any evidence that nation-states are starting to harvest encrypted data in anticipation of all this?

Because there's been some debate about that out there. Yeah. Now, the debate about harvest now, decrypt later, and what kind of problem it actually poses to the average organization, I think it's safe to assume that if you protect something of very high value that might be high value, especially to a nation-state, that it's likely to be getting attention.

Do we know that harvest now, decrypt later is a real thing? Oh, 100%. And all advanced nations do it, right?

They collect as much as they can because that data, knowing that we'll have that quantum computer online in the coming years, it's of incredible value to stockpile that data. So is it happening? There is zero doubt.

What impact it has on any given organization, that's where there may be some hype around it, and it has to be down to the organization to know the value of their data and what's exposed. All right, folks. You heard it here.

The risks are real. And I wish you all a happy Quantum Day, but I'm not quite sure that happy is the right word here. Hey, Rebecca, thanks for being on the show.

Thanks, Mike. Thanks for having me. All right, and back to you guys in the studio.