Post-quantum Crypto: Today’s defense against tomorrow’s quantum hacker

Quantum computers pose a grave threat to the cryptography we use today. Sure, they might not be built for another decade, but today’s secrets are nonetheless at risk: indeed, many adversaries have the capabilities to record encrypted traffic and decrypt it later. In this talk I’ll give an overview of post-quantum cryptography (PQC), a set of quantum-safe alternatives developed to alleviate this problem. I’ll present the lessons we have learned from our prototype integrations into real-life protocols and applications (such as TLS, SSH, and VPN), and our experiments on a variety of devices, ranging from IoT devices, to cloud servers, to HSMs. I’ll discuss the Open Quantum Safe project for PQC development, and related open-source forks of OpenSSL, OpenSSH, and OpenVPN that can be used to experiment with PQC today. I’ll present a demo of a full (key exchange + authentication) PQC TLS 1.3 connection. Come learn about the practicality of PQC, and how to start experimenting with PQC to defend your applications and services against the looming quantum threat.

Presented by