Quantum-safe security needs to start before quantum computers arrive

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 0:33

   But Arvind, maybe we could start and talk a little bit about where things stand today from your view. Sure. So, a little bit of what David just touched on is DARPA has been running a competition called QBI, or Quantum Benchmarking Initiative. A couple of hundred companies joined it a couple of years ago. I think it's down to maybe 13 are left. So that tells you kind of what's maybe real. I'm calling it maybe not quite real some of it is real and so their goal is who can build a quantum computer that works let's sort of put the technology side out of it and the debates are is it 2028 2029 2033 and sort of if you pick the middle point let's call it 2030 well it will break today's cryptography that's not a supposition that's just a reality and if that's going to happen then what's the cryptography that you've got to use to protect yourself against that.

2. 1:28

   Unfortunately for some of you, what's even worse, if you have an encrypted hard disk today that gets stolen, somebody could keep it for five years and break it at that point. The good news is post-quantum cryptography is understood, it's well known, the code is written, but people have been too lazy to get to it. But I think the wake-up moment is now. Are the solutions that we understand quantum proof or quantum resistance?

3. 1:55

   Because it's sort of based on our basic understanding today of what quantum probably looks like. Yeah. No, it is based on understanding at a theoretical level of what quantum could do. So they are quantum proof in the same level of rigor that today's cryptography cannot be broken by today's classical computers. That's actually not a theorem proof level answer. It's more based on complexity theory in computer science, which is grounded at the end on some assumptions, not on.

4. 2:28

   So if you look at where we are today and that 2030 midpoint, can you just walk us through the evolutionary moments that you need to see where we all have to start paying attention and say, OK, how do we move? Yes. So today you got toy quantum computers. I'll call them toys because they can do certain problems, but they are rife with errors. They have no way to scale fully yet. So question one will be, who's the first one who can demonstrate not a simulation, not on the side, but some level of error correction or mitigation on a running quantum computer?

5. 3:05

   Step one. And so I'll predict you'll see somebody make claims by next year. then you should get third parties to evaluate are those claims real you'll find one or two will make progress by 2027 error correction not at scale but error correction yeah question two will be can you run these things at some level of scale not yet complete scale i call it gate computations for the lack of a better word today most people are somewhere around 10 000 which if you think a normal computer is not very much when your iphone does a couple of billion per minute yeah so gate competitions is somebody scaling from 10 000 are they adding a zero each year that's the second milestone i would put you put those two steps together Now, if you put a zero per year, that means you could be at 10 million by 2029.

6. 4:05

   That's remarkable. That can do some things that'll surprise the hell out of everybody. Does this reference kind of this notion of a logical qubit being kind of an error-corrected operating qubit? Is that a term you've adopted, logical qubits, that everyone kind of has the same milestone, the same metric? I don't love the term, but I think it's a fair term to just explain to people to say, hey, if I say, I'm building a computer that's got 10,000 qubits, and they say, yeah, but they're all noisy.

7. 4:35

   You're right. So if I begin to error correct, it in some sense decreases the effective capacity of the machine. So a logical then says, okay, what's the effective capacity of this machine is, I think, a reasonable way to look at it. So that's a term that I don't love because it's not like I've taken these four things and it's like a DRAM cell and that's it. It's actually the whole machine is interconnected, but it's got some divide.

8. 5:02

   So 10,000 physical, maybe 200 logical. Nikesh, you have red teams that think about what is at the frontier and pushing it. Let's say that you start to see these ooms, these orders of magnitude start to compound. If you had to guess, where would your red team say are the obvious honeypots? Where do you point that if you were a bad actor? If you think from the perspective of everybody here has pretty much crypto keys running across the entire IT infrastructure. It's not one thing. Everything is running with crypto keys which are encrypted. Every vendor in our space has keys at each end.

9. 5:39

   So the first thing that's going to happen is whatever is not quantum proof is going to be breakable. So our view is you can't wait for 2029 or 2030 because it's not like one day all of us going to go out and say oh shit let's go burn five trillion dollars of IT infrastructure and let's go build it again in one year because now we need quantum safe infrastructure so you should be built you should be replacing your IT stack today with quantum safe or quantum proof infrastructure right now now there are technologies there are capabilities which are already out of the market where you can start you know wrapping post-quantum ready keys around traffic as a stopgap. So you can do that. But the time, if he says it's 20, 20, 9, 30, we're only late.

10. 6:26

    We're three years away. Four years away. And I'm pretty sure everybody in this room has got a few hundred million dollars of IT spend that is earmarked for this year. And I'm guessing 50% of your spend is on infrastructure that is not quantum safe. There was a pretty senior AI researcher that said we don't need to wait. 29? Hmm? 29?