Quantum cryptography implementation timelines must be shortened, industry CEO to tell Congress

Ahead of a Wednesday House congressional hearing examining the intersection of cybersecurity and advanced technologies, Eddy Zervigon, the CEO of Quantum XChange, said he plans to stress to lawmakers the cyber fault lines that can occur when AI and quantum computing converge.

“The first thing we're going to really talk about is with the advent of this advanced computing age — AI and soon to be quantum at some point — the combination is unlike anything that we've seen in the past, certainly as it relates to encryption,” Zervigon told Nextgov/FCW in an interview. “That's a whole new threat vector that we have no idea how it's going to roll out over time.”

The outcomes of pairing a fault-tolerant quantum computer with AI software are not definitively known, but experts like Zervigon are worried about the ramifications that combining advanced computing capabilities with AI algorithms will have on the current encryption schemes that have made up modern cybersecurity protocols.

“It creates a vulnerability that we have been very…insulated from because [for] basically 50 years three algorithms have kind of led the encryption charge for us,” he said. “It's an extraordinary technological run that's about to end.”

Quantum XChange, founded in 2018, specializes in implementing the post-quantum cryptographic algorithms standardized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology across network encryption architecture. Zervigon warned that a common mistake organizations make is not fortifying the network’s entire architecture when incorporating quantum-resistant algorithms.

“Probably the first key statement that I'll make in terms of this is that the question that we should all be asking is: What happens when the algorithm breaks?” he said. 

Prior to the advent of a quantum computer that can reliably execute algorithmic demands — which doesn’t have a definitive arrival time — experts worry about harvest-now-decrypt-later schemes that collect encrypted data with the hope of decrypting it with future quantum computing capabilities. 

Companies included in the Quantum Industry Coalition, like Quantum XChange, advocate for the strategic, effective migration to a PQC-standardized encryption across federal data ecosystems ahead of that fault-tolerant quantum computer. Zervigon plans to echo this stance during his Wednesday testimony. 

“What my call to action for Congress is … to remove length, or shorten, or accelerate the timelines that have been put legislatively into this migration,” he said. “Why are we setting these artificial timelines when, at the end of the day, we could start doing this now, cheaply? Every day that we are not moving to post quantum crypto is another harvestable day of data that's out there, that can be compromised in the future.”