Amit Sinha, DigiCert | World Quantum Readiness Day

Well, thanks John. It's always a pleasure being back at theCUBE. I love chatting with you. It seems only yesterday I was here at the First World Quantum Readiness Day event, and time has flown. And here we are at event number two.

It's a great question, John. Moving to Quantum is a huge change for organizations. And whenever people and organizations are faced with a big change, they usually go through the five stages of grief. It starts with denial. So organizations will often say, well, Quantum's a boogeyman. It's 10 years out there, it doesn't concern us. And then they hear from experts about, well, it really impacts them and they have to do something about it. And they go from there to bargaining. And bargaining is usually around, do I really have to worry about it for the next five years? Is this really in scope? Maybe it only affects the National Security Agency and super top secret organizations, not us. And then they dive deeper and they find out, well, it touches everything. It touches authentication, encryption, their foundational digital trust fabric, and they have to go through all of that. So that leads to anger. And anger is followed by a bit of depression when people realize, well, I don't have the resources, I don't have the budget. I don't have the exact buy-in. Even if I start today, I run out of time before I'm able to upgrade my entire trust fabric to make it quantum safe. And then finally, you get to acceptance when you realize, well, you just have to keep calm, move along and adopt post-quantum cryptography. So we've been tracking this for a while now, and when I started talking about post-quantum cryptography, most organizations and people were in denial. I just wrapped up our seven city Digital Trust Summit Roadshow, and I had the opportunity to meet over 700 organizations, and we did a live poll. We asked them, where are you in these five stages of emotions around PQC? Well, the good news is about 43% of organizations are in acceptance. They accept and they are actually doing tangible things to move to quantum safety. I'd say about 5% of those organizations are really advanced. We still have about 24% of organizations in denial. And part of the reason we are doing this event is to make sure everyone understands the importance of migrating to quantum safety. And then they go through those stages. And my bet is this is the year where most organizations, the vast majority of them accept that the time to act is now, and they all have to move and upgrade their digital trust fabric to make it quantum safe.

Yeah, that's a great question and part of the reason why people are still in denial is because we've been talking about quantum computing for a while. IBM was a pioneer and continues to be a pioneer in quantum computing, chipsets and infrastructure. But more recently, if you look at all the hyperscalers, Google, Microsoft, AWS, and more recently Nvidia and Cisco, they've all announced their bigger, faster, better quantum processors. So in many ways, I feel like this is the early days of transistors. Remember the Intel 4004 and the first few chips. And so where we are is in those early days of quantum computing, but the rate at which advances are happening is staggering. And most of the companies are addressing two problems. One is, how do I have more qbits, quantum bits similar to the early days of transistors? How do I pack more transistors and get more memory and more processing capabilities? The other aspect is how do I fix error correction so I can get more logical qbits out of the same physical number of qbits? Because errors in quantum computing is a big problem that needs to be solved. So my thesis is that quantum computing will have a ChatGPT moment where one day people will get up and wonder, wow, how did this disruption happen? Well, it's been cooking for a while, and all of the big tech firms are in a race for quantum supremacy because they view this as the next big thing. Now, the challenges and the advantages and disadvantages, quantum computing is a double-edged sword. If you looked at the Google announcement, they claimed that their willow chip was able to do a computation in five minutes. That would've taken the lifetime of the universe on the fastest supercomputer that's available today. So that's the massive compute capabilities that quantum computing can unleash and it can solve problems that are just infeasible today. But the flip side that we've known for a very long time is that it breaks current cryptography. The current cryptography, John, like you and I discussed, is based on these one-way math problems, like factoring large numbers into primes or discrete logarithms. So we've known for a while that Shor's algorithm can break RSA. If RSA is broken today, the internet would melt down. Similarly, we know Diffie-Hellman can be broken, and these are foundational algorithms that allow us to share keys, do encryption, do authentication. Similarly, Grover's algorithm for search exists for quantum computers that can cut down SHA256 and make it only as effective as half the number of bits. So those are the challenges. What I'd say is we are still in the early days of quantum computing, but the rate of advance is very rapid and all the big tech firms are on this race for quantum supremacy, and it's going to happen on an unpredictable timeline.

I mean, the short answer is yes. Post-quantum cryptography is here. DigiCert has been working along with other cryptography experts. We've been collaborating with the National Institute of Standards and Technology. NIST, last year was a big year in fall last year when we did our first World Quantum Readiness Day event, NIST had announced the first three post-quantum cryptography algorithms, one for encryption and two for authentication. They are the FIPS 203, 204 and 205 standards. So these algorithms have been cooking for almost a decade. They've been looked at by some of the foremost math experts, cryptography experts, and they're available now as standards. In fact, the Digicert one platform supports all of these algorithms today where customers can play around experiment, benchmark, performance, et cetera. So the short answer is PQC algorithms are here. Now, there's work being done in the IETF to leverage the TLS 1.3 standard, which is what is used for encryption and authentication on internet communications to migrate them to these PQC algorithms. And it's a matter of months where a TLS 1.3 PQC standard will be available. We're going to have lots of experts today in our technical tracks talk about the ML-KEM algorithm, the ML-DSA algorithms that are available today. So stay tuned and you're going to learn a lot about the state of the art as far as PQC is concerned.

Yeah, it's a great question, John. And look, industry leaders are acting. You use iMessage on your Apple device, probably use WhatsApp. All of these messaging protocols have adopted PQC for key exchange. That is because people are concerned about harvest now and decrypt later style attacks. Even though we don't have sufficiently stable quantum computers to break current cryptography, people are concerned that packets on the internet can be sniffed and stored offline so that they can be decrypted later on. And that's the harvest now and decrypt later attack. Bad guys doing that, states doing that. They're waiting to attack and unlock those keys. Exactly. So to prevent that, iMessage, WhatsApp, even Zoom recently, whenever an organization controls both sides of the communication link, it's easy for them to upgrade their classical algorithms to post-quantum because they're able to do it unilaterally. We're still waiting, as I said, for IETF to come up with a TLS version client server where you have browser-based or app-based clients and servers that are run by different organizations that can interoperate and talk with each other. But again, lots of companies are doing it. You're going to hear from Cloudflare, they have done some very innovative things from the CDN edge to the origin server, making sure that that link is quantum safe. Cloud infrastructure vendors, Google, Microsoft, others, they've all started experimenting with HSMs and KMS key management systems that are quantum safe. So progressive organizations know that PQC is here and they're adopting it. The enterprises, they need to start prioritizing budgeting and migrating all their infrastructure and systems to quantum safety.

First, it's a great question. I've said a few times that the PKI industry is going through renaissance because three or four massive disruptive changes that are happening at the same time. So first, these algorithms behind PKI, behind certificates, behind authentication, encryption need to move from classical, which is broken by quantum, to quantum safe versions that we talked about. But also, even in the current classical cryptography sense, big industry standard changes are happening. Apple and Google recently introduced a ballot that got approved, which is going to take certificates that are today issued for a year and shrink that to 47 days. And that's a huge change. It's eight times more certificate operational overheads for organizations because a certificate that was valid on a system for a year suddenly is valid only for 47 days, and that change is going to happen over the next few years. So today, certificates are valid for 398 days. Come March next year in 2026, they'll be valid for 200 days. March 2027, they'll be valid for a hundred days. And then finally in 2029, they'll be valid for 47 days. I haven't met a single organization that does not have outages related to expired certificates. So if you're having outages today, two or three outages a day, it is common for some of these bigger organizations. Imagine what happens when you go to 47 days. You're going to have eight times more unless you modernize your PKI, unless you have a platform that can give you crypto agility, unless you have a platform that can give you dynamic automation, so you're not doing all of these things manually. So shortening certificate validity periods are forcing the need for automation. They're forcing the need for crypto agility, and that prepares organizations naturally to adopt post-quantum cryptography as well. Because what do you need? Crypto agility is all about having an inventory, having the ability and automation to dynamically swap out certificates, cryptographic algorithms, keys, and if you're able to automate it, then this migration to post-quantum doesn't seem like a massive once in a third year upgrade cycle.

Yeah, so look, in fact, we did a recent survey and we had Forrester do a total economic impact analysis, and they found that if you prepare for crypto agility, if you have automation in place, you can get over 300% ROI from that investment because you have less outages, you're not spending money in manual certificate rotations and manual steps that are needed to run this infrastructure. Now, on the PQC side, what's interesting is analysts such as Gartner are coming back and saying, well, we never gave a date, but now let's put a date. Gartner, for example, has said current asymmetric cryptography must be retired by 2029, and that happens to be the same timeline for the certificate validities that shrink from 398 days to 47 days. So you can see that all of these roads lead to Rome, and that's PKI modernization. Even if you don't believe in PQC, you must have a modern PKI system to be able to deal with shortening validity periods. And if you do that, you naturally prepare yourself for post-quantum cryptography because then swapping a classical algorithm with a PQC one, swapping a certificate that used RSA with a certificate that used ML-KEM becomes easier.

I think 2029 is a great date. As I said, it aligns with classical cryptography, shortening certificate validity periods. It aligns with Gartner and other experts talking about retiring and moving to post quantum. So next three years are going to be game changer. And the reason we are doing this Quantum Readiness Day event is the reality is for most organizations, even if they start today, even if they drop a bunch of things, they'll run out of time before they're able to upgrade. Because this is a once in a generation upgrade to the core foundational PKI infrastructure. And we are here to help. You're not in this alone, and we're looking forward to the sessions. We have a great lineup of experts where you'll get both business insights as well as technical blueprints and know-how on how to approach this massive problem.

Absolutely. Thanks, John.