Chasing Cyber - #26 - Are You Ready?
PQC excuses, QKD speed-ups, plus bananas
Opinion: Too Many Heads Are in the Sand
If NIST publishes their PQC standards tomorrow, would you be ready?
Today, you can dodge the issue. “I’d love to get started, but the standards aren’t out yet!” Soon that response won’t cut it any more.
The NIST announcement will be global news. The broadsheets read by company board members will cover it. High-ranking executives will helicopter down to ask about plans for tackling the quantum threat. You’ll be quizzed about store-now, decrypt-later attacks, and cryptographic inventories.
Hopefully, as a reader of my newsletter, you’re already thinking about this stuff. But if you’re a serial can-kicker, remember we might be less than 100 days from new PQC standards. And the deafening boom of a starting gun.
Faster QKD at Long Distances
A new paper from TU Eindhoven proposes a CV-QKD scheme with key rates far higher than typically assumed limits.
The scheme targets long-distance communications and relies on the use of unusual error-correcting codes. Typically these codes are impractical to implement because they require too much memory. But in long-distance CV-QKD, the low rates make it feasible to consider.
As a reminder, CV-QKD (or "continuous-variable" QKD) is an attractive technology because it operates at normal telecom wavelengths. This paper seems interesting because it explores higher key establishment rates at long distances, which will be a typical deployment model for QKD.
I freely admit this paper is beyond me mathematically, so I'll leave interested readers to conclude whether they find this result plausible and/or exciting.
You can find the paper here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.04770.
European Telcos Go Bananas for QKD
This article gives a good overview of the QKD activities of European telcos.
The interviewee is Andrew Lord, Senior Manager of Optical Research at BT. Andrew is well-known to those in the quantum cyber sector.
It's a balanced article that touches on NIST perspectives as well as hardware challenges. There's even a reference to my favourite subject, quantum randomness, which lies at the heart of QKD devices.
What's fascinating is the summary of activity by European telcos. Alongside BT, there are projects underway involving Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, and Vodafone.
Take a read and let me know what you think.