Explore America’s “transition to a post-quantum world”“, The Washington Post interviewed US federal official Nick Polk, who focuses on national security issues, including quantum computing and is also a senior advisor to a federal information security official at the House White) :
The Washington Post: The United States is in the early stages of a major shift focused on strengthening government network defenses, pushing federal agencies to adopt a new encryption standard known as post-quantum cryptography which aims to prevent systems from being vulnerable to advanced decryption techniques enabled by quantum computers in the near future…
Nick Polk: We’ve been using asymmetric encryption for a very long time now, and it’s been ubiquitous since around 2014, when the US government and some big tech companies decided to make it the default encryption on most web browsers. Interestingly enough, when it comes to the post-quantum cryptographic standards being developed, the only thing that’s quantum about them is that they have the word “quantum” in their name. This is actually a different type of mathematics that is much more difficult for a quantum computer to reverse engineer. The National Institute of Standards and Technology studies different mathematical models to cover all their bases. What’s interesting is that these post-quantum standards are actually used to protect the classical computers we have today, like laptops…
Given the scale of the U.S. government and the amount of computing power we use, we truly view ourselves and our role as a manager of the technology ecosystem. One of the things that came out of this week’s Inside Quantum Technology conference in New York is that we are moving very quickly with the private sector to migrate to post-quantum cryptography. I think you’re going to see very soon a lot of very sensitive industries in the private sector start to migrate or start to announce that they’re going to migrate. Banks are a perfect example. This means meeting with vendors regularly and testing their algorithms to ensure we can implement them accurately and efficiently on federal systems…
The memorandum of administration and national security set 2035 as deadline as a government to migrate our (national security) systems to post-quantum cryptography. This is meant to coincide with the development of operational quantum computers. We need to make sure we start now, so we don’t end up missing the deadline before the computers are up and running… This is a priority migration for the US government. We’ll start with our most critical systems, which are what we call high-value assets and high-impact systems. So, for example, we will prioritize systems that contain personal health information.
That’s our main goal — both when we’re talking to the private sector and when we’re encouraging agencies when they’re talking with their contractors and suppliers — to really think about where your most sensitive data is. , then prioritize the migration of these systems.
