Pioneering the Future with BTQ’s Post-Quantum Innovations

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Quantum State, a podcast exploring the latest research and innovation in quantum computing. Join us as we dive into ground-breaking breakthroughs, trends and news shaping the quantum landscape. The Quantum State. Today we have Chris Tam with us, who is the head of partnerships at BTQ

[00:00:36] and is focusing on the company's innovative strides in post-quantum cryptography and strategic partnerships in shaping the quantum industry. So Chris, can you share with us your journey into the quantum industry and how you became the head of partnerships at BTQ?

[00:00:51] Yeah, for sure. Hey guys, thanks for having me on today. So my journey to BTQ was probably pretty unique. I feel like everybody's journey is pretty unique. Where it started for me was back in university.

[00:01:06] I had come across this paper that Nick, the CEO of BTQ and Olivier had published. I think with their, maybe their prior company was a company called Zypher. And this paper was on the topic of post-quantum cryptography.

[00:01:24] And it was funny. I was sitting in actually my own cryptography class in my undergrad computer science program. And we were learning at the same time just what this public key cryptography was.

[00:01:36] And I remember thinking, I was sitting in that class, I was like, man, the stuff really isn't that interesting. And then when I saw this paper come out and I was like, oh wait, there's quantum attacks to break this public key cryptography.

[00:01:47] And then I started looking at where, everywhere where public key cryptography was used in general. I started to understand the significance of this work. And so that's when I became most interested.

[00:02:00] And then I reached out to Nick saying I stumbled across this paper and all of a sudden has like had this like was reinvigorated to study cryptography and to learn more about it. And so I reached out and at the same time he was starting up with BTQ.

[00:02:17] So he gave me an opportunity to come on board, do some work for the summer, which I really enjoyed. And then come come to the end of the summer. I just hopped on full time and have been enjoying my time at BTQ ever since.

[00:02:33] Yeah, so did you study math or computer science or physics? It was it was computer science and software engineering in undergrad. Okay, cool. So how did that feel jumping into the quantum side? It still feels like a bit of a master to be honest.

[00:02:50] I feel like, you know, I personally still don't understand most of what the what like Peter and Gavin, you know, the work that they're doing is incredible. We look at it more from the cryptography side, I suppose, and me specifically more on the product side.

[00:03:07] So the implementation and kind of commercialization of this of these technologies. But yeah, it's still still definitely whirlwind and you know, I just feel grateful that I'm able to sit on calls with them and I learned something new every single time. So it's fantastic. Cool.

[00:03:22] So based on the things you've said, I mean, the work that we're talking about sits at the intersection of a few different fields, computer science, cryptography, quantum computing. It's very hard to find anyone in the world who's an expert in all of those things.

[00:03:36] But what do you see as the most important thing to keep in mind moving forward and what does that translate to in terms of BTQ's overall mission and how it sees its role in safeguarding the quantum threat in the future? Yeah, yeah, definitely. Yeah.

[00:03:57] So I'd say the most important thing is probably the intersection of these technologies, right?

[00:04:01] So we see blockchain hitting this wall of quantum computing where the cryptography underpinning blockchains are against or under attack or will be under attack by these adversarial quantum computers who are able to execute algorithms, which essentially breaks the cryptography and security of these blockchains.

[00:04:23] And so I think what's really unique about BTQ is that we're able to think about this in a multifaceted, multi-dimensional way where we're taking into account, you know, we have like you guys who are a wonderful team in quantum algorithms research.

[00:04:39] We have a fantastic team in Taiwan doing post-quantum cryptography. And then we're thinking about this all at the intersection, the conjunction of these technologies hitting colliding heads. And I feel like that's really what gives us our advantage.

[00:04:52] I think basically it's a standard terminology these days in the industry, not just within BTQ.

[00:04:59] People talk about having a full stack response to whatever it is that they're looking at in quantum hardware, they talk about this and software, they talk about this in the context of what BTQ is doing. What's the interpretation of that phrase, full stack development?

[00:05:16] Yeah, yeah, that's a really good point. So, I mean at BTQ we really do operate at several layers of this stack and that's another area that's really interesting. So we look at solving problems through the lens of first principles research, which is very low level, very theoretical.

[00:05:34] And then translating that to how do we make research, essentially how do we translate this research into a common language that everybody can understand? And that's typically through standardizations efforts.

[00:05:47] So we have paid very close attention to the US standardizations research led through the National Institute of Standardization, and then we've also been participating in those standardizations efforts ourselves.

[00:06:04] So yeah, we do kind of low level research then standardizations and everything that gets standardized, that gets approved, it needs to be kind of realized in the physical world. It needs to be manifested in some way.

[00:06:20] So that's really where our work in hardware specifically around semiconductor manufacturing comes in. We design circuits and essentially implement and optimize cryptography and these like these standardized algorithms into hardware.

[00:06:34] And then we look at further optimizations and kind of interfacing this research with applications through software, so making further improvements and kind of like polishing off the stack so that people are able to use it, consume it.

[00:06:53] Hopefully in a way that they don't even really, that they don't really.

[00:06:56] And how does BTQ strategically position itself in the market like BTQ is working on both blockchain and quantum technologies, but those two communities maybe don't necessarily talk to each other that much so how do you handle that?

[00:07:15] Yeah, yeah, no that's a really interesting point. I mean, I think we're probably one of the few teams where we have like world-class cryptographers and quantum researchers in the same building, in the same room.

[00:07:30] And so again kind of coming back to like when we look at applications in the world, nothing is a solid away from each other right?

[00:07:39] Like everything kind of comes together in a system and we kind of, or a lot of the work that we're doing, we look at through the lens of productization.

[00:07:48] So when there's things like central bank digital currencies which are emerging in the world, those heavily rely on cryptography to implement them but then also the security and kind of knowing what kind of timelines we have to manage in order to make those central bank digital currencies secure in the long run.

[00:08:08] And that's where all of this, all of the different team members come together. Yeah, that's really interesting. I think one of the big things I remember from undergrad is I was on the physics side so I worked in a physics research lab it was just hardware.

[00:08:22] Every now and then we wandered upstairs to talk to the theorists but I was in the basement right?

[00:08:27] And one of the coolest thing about industry is getting folks from different viewpoints together and being able to have those different viewpoints from the cryptography side, from the computer science side, from the physics side. I always joke that physicists are great coders but they're horrible software engineers.

[00:08:43] But you need that to actually make a real product work in the real world and then have people use it, you know, it's not always going to be physicists using these systems, these quantum systems and quantum computers. Yeah, definitely.

[00:08:57] I mean that's also an interesting point. I mean it requires a very specific type of leadership slash management style to be able to oversee all the people with these skill sets in such a way that they're on a common wavelength and they can do something if you've got someone with a software engineering background who's never done physics could be kind of hard to communicate how to go about writing software.

[00:09:22] Yeah. Yeah, I once had to try and convince a physicist to use GitHub and that was like a six week exercise and that only, I only managed to win that argument after so he was backing it up using Google Drive.

[00:09:35] Like every night and I was like this is you can't do this is not going to work and then someone screwed up this code and it obviously overwrote his code overnight and he couldn't get his version back and I was like, huh, that's what GitHub is for and I finally won that argument.

[00:09:49] But it took a while, right? Like our processes, our standards are different and then Chris on your customer side, then you have to take the engineers, the physicists and their words and translate it to the customer.

[00:10:00] And I find the biggest thing with scientists, right is when I talk to founders that are starting companies, they get really in the weeds with the technical details which is very cool but in the end the customer does not care if you're using a quantum computer or something else.

[00:10:15] They care that they're going to get the results that they want and that in the end is what product leaderships and partnerships. I'm sure you're going in between all those folks every day.

[00:10:24] Yeah, exactly. And I think that's what makes it so fun is because you get to speak different languages and then at the end of the day everybody is trying to find that a common thread.

[00:10:33] We're all trying to move the ball forward in terms of performance, security and then also just trying to conduct business as usual. And that's probably the most thrilling part is being able to tie these pieces together and I think what our team is also extremely well equipped to do.

[00:10:51] Great. So now can we go through the BTQ products? There's PQ scale, Keelung, Kenting, QBite. I've been talking about QBite a lot recently just because answering the same questions over and over you know it's not a... Until we're doomed.

[00:11:09] Yeah, exactly. It's like the doomsday clock which is one of my favorite things even though it's a simple product but yeah can we go through some of the products that BTQ has and who you're targeting and hoping we'll use these products?

[00:11:21] Yeah, definitely. Yeah so the first one we can start off with is PQ scale. So this is a... Technically it's a signature aggregation service and so really what inspired us to build this was combating the fact that these post quantum cryptographic algorithms,

[00:11:39] especially the ones standardized by NAST, they're much larger in size. So compared to the algorithms that we use today for example elliptic curve cryptography, the signatures for elliptic curve cryptography is about 66 bytes versus the smallest

[00:12:00] NIST standardized algorithm which is 666 bytes for a signature. So it's a 10x increase at least when you move to post quantum cryptography and what that does for a lot of businesses is it just makes a lot of their operations lower and almost

[00:12:16] unusable because then their latencies go up, customers get upset, costs go up as well. So it really introduces a whole set of problems. Is it for... Go ahead.

[00:12:30] Sorry for post quantum cryptography that we have today is it a perceptible difference? I know I've heard the stats on like key sizes being X bigger but what's the actual speed? Can a customer see that which I know is a little bit of a different

[00:12:44] difficult question. There's Amazon did a study actually that latency like every something like 10 milliseconds they lose like a million dollars or something in revenue. I made up those stats. I don't know what it is but it was crazy where performance really matters for Amazon.

[00:12:58] The customer doesn't perceive that but it affects the bottom line. So is that in actual like it is unusable at this point problem or it's a perception problem? But somewhere in the back of the mind kind of revenue problem?

[00:13:11] Yeah, yeah. So I think it depends on the business. So I mean the Amazon status is really interesting and I mean Amazon is a very large company maybe they are able to take a bit of a hit but for other applications.

[00:13:24] So for example we look at these like resource constrained networks, especially digital asset networks which operate on the internet without any major kind of AWS to power it.

[00:13:36] And so one study that we'd like to look at is the Bank of International Settlements, the BIS it's like the central bank of central banks. They're conducting a lot of research on central bank digital currencies.

[00:13:49] And what they found was that with this with quantum safe signatures or cryptography the duration of end to end payments went up five fold. So took five times longer people have to wait five times longer to have their payments finalize.

[00:14:04] And then also the transactions per second went down by over 2000 times. So this is like a very tangible impact on people and with the number of CBDC projects going on around the world, every major country or every I guess I should say every country with a mature financial ecosystem is looking at CBDCs.

[00:14:28] And so there it's something that you know very well might become at the fabric or be at the fabric of our everyday lives so this five fold increase in duration and then you know TPS going down by so much really I feel like is going to be a substantial impact on our day to day lives on commerce.

[00:14:47] And so yeah this is really why we wanted to build the signature aggregation method which helps us essentially reduce the size of these post quantum algorithms.

[00:14:57] So essentially what we do is called signature aggregation. What we do is as every time, especially on a on a digital asset every time it a transaction is made.

[00:15:08] It's signed by someone so that people can verify that that this transaction came from me and that is also legitimate hasn't been tampered with.

[00:15:17] And so every transaction is signed and it goes on to the network and so you can imagine essentially this like whole list of transactions that have an accompanying signature with it.

[00:15:25] And what PQ scale does is it takes all these signatures to then it kind of compresses them down into a single signature which can be easily verified.

[00:15:34] So essentially we can have way over the check the validity of all these signatures make sure that they're legitimate and they haven't been tampered with by just verifying this one accurate signature.

[00:15:44] And so we're hoping this will do a lot for for these for these resource constraints last at networks. Yeah, that's really interesting. Sorry Anastasia.

[00:15:55] No I just wanted to make a comment because the transaction times are really interesting because I think there's a and maybe this is me dating myself, because I was talking to a new college grad a couple years ago, and they were telling me oh you know Bitcoin can never really be used because the transaction times are too long and I ask them.

[00:16:15] Oh 10 minutes. He's like yeah way too long and then I go, you've never sent a wire transfer have you.

[00:16:21] For me, you know looking at that or like 5x the length of that wire transfer still a lot better than I'm used to right but yeah as you're talking about these approaches that's that's really interesting because there are a lot of applications where that's much more important like we talked about the Amazon the purchases even the purchases every day right you don't want to wait 10 minutes to be confirmed that your order is placed.

[00:16:46] Exactly if you're a merchant and you sold something over the counter and you have to wait 10 minutes till you make sure that you actually got the money into your account that's a little bit nerve wracking.

[00:16:55] The description about PQ scale that's essentially a software based implementation, a technique for optimizing the the execution time of the actual software that's running these algorithms but the other avenue altogether is also at the hardware side all the chips in our computers and phones and everything they have.

[00:17:18] A hardware optimized inside the CPUs units for doing all the standard cryptographic primitives that we rely upon. Can you tell us a bit about that avenue as well to complement the software side.

[00:17:33] Yeah exactly so so as we talked about before doing this full stack or having this full stack approach to quantum resistance.

[00:17:41] So we operate at the hardware level so here we have products QQ sim and Kenting and these are our approaches to really accelerate the implementation or the kind of the the physical execution of these post quantum algorithms at the hardware level.

[00:18:03] So Q sim is our approach to optimizing this again these NIST standardized algorithms specifically around deletion where we can do much much faster signing so key generation and key signing or I guess signature signing using these using physical hardware.

[00:18:23] And this is something that we've been we've been building for for a long time. We actually made a bet far ahead of when these NIST standardized algorithms released that certain families string classes of algorithms would make it through.

[00:18:37] And this is you know we have a very academic team and they had a they have an intuition of what are the properties of these algorithms that would make them very suitable to be standardized.

[00:18:46] And so we had a bit of a head start compared to a lot of other teams in optimizing these algorithms and so that's where yeah that's where a lot of our hardware efforts were born making this bet.

[00:18:58] Optimizing them working on them and then having them eventually standardized which was which was a huge sigh of relief. And can you talk a little bit about the pre on. I went to the NIST website for submissions, the alternate section.

[00:19:15] And I know I see that pre on is one of those that doesn't have any comments which means that no one has found an attack against it and several others do have comments with the tax. Yeah. So yeah, you describe that.

[00:19:29] Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so it's a pre on is our our submission to the fourth round of the NIST competition for post quantum cryptographic standardizations.

[00:19:40] Just to kind of paint the picture. So the NIST competition for post quantization stations have been going on for a number of years since late 2016 2017 and finally in 2022. Three digital signature algorithms were approved. Two of them came from this family.

[00:20:01] I guess the script cryptographic family called lattices and then the third one, or maybe you can also call it the first one because it's being standardized first called Sphinx comes from a hash based family.

[00:20:13] And what the what NIST is trying to do in this fourth round is open up, open up the competition to different submissions that kind of diversify the future standard as algorithms so we already have lattice based we already have hash based in order just in

[00:20:32] case God forbid if anything gets if any of those get broken. We should have some other algorithms from different types from different families to to fall back on.

[00:20:42] And this is where we where we came up with our pre on submission which is a, and it's the only zk or zero knowledge based digital signature algorithm.

[00:20:54] And one of the really nice things about pre on is that it affords some more kind of sophisticated, sophisticated features that you can't typically do with these digital signature algorithms that are currently standardized.

[00:21:08] So you can do things like commit and reveal where you can commit certain pieces of information and then reveal those pieces of information to be true. And this is something that you just some, yes, some functionality that you don't get out of the other standardized algorithms.

[00:21:24] And yeah to your point in the first 30 hours of the of the fourth round opening. There was a handful like most of these of the algorithms found where we're found it to be broken and ours has survived and continues to survive.

[00:21:42] Which is nice. It must be a little nerve wracking when you put it up there, you're just waiting to see what kind of attacks are going to come.

[00:21:50] Right, right. Yeah, I guess that's that's the idea of science where you just I mean it's our hypothesis that this is this is a quantum safe algorithm and we're just someone putting for someone to break it.

[00:22:02] This must be one of these nightmare scenarios for cryptographers that you know the bar is very high. You can't get away with any kind of approximations or anything wrong at all when it comes to cryptography.

[00:22:15] And there are so many ways things can go wrong. It must be an absolute nightmare lying awake at sleep at night wondering who's going to be able to break the algorithm up just to submit it.

[00:22:26] Right. Yeah, it's a bit of war of attrition like mental and where yeah I mean the team who built it that we have world class cryptographers there coming from Honhai Research Institute from BTQ from from some very good universities in the states.

[00:22:46] So yeah, those that that team is able to back up what they put out. Do you have an internal team at BTQ that's meant to go just spends all their time trying to break it.

[00:23:01] Well, I feel like that is the team who came up with it there. Yeah they've been very rigorous and they were working, you know, very long hours and I saw what they were running on the whiteboard and they were coming up with every possible attack factor for it so

[00:23:17] they must be pretty confident about it with what they submitted. There's a completely different tangent of products that BTQ has been looking at as well not just purely encryption decryption and signatures. And there's one key long and I open source project that BTQ released.

[00:23:37] Can you tell us about what that product is what it, what the problem is that it's solving and how that fits in with the whole post quantum ecosystem and blockchain ecosystem. Yeah for sure so key long is a language to write zero knowledge programs.

[00:23:57] Zero knowledge is this type of cryptography where you can essentially prove the execution of programs.

[00:24:05] And this allows you to do really nice things. It's used in any theorem to prove the like valid execution of transactions so that you can do this off chain using like very powerful computers and then bring it bring that proof on chain to be there to verify those those transactions very cheaply.

[00:24:24] So that's used to scale a theorem for example. And there's some also really nice like privacy preserving use cases for zero knowledge identity comes to mind where you can essentially create a proof of your citizenship.

[00:24:39] You can create kind of world coin is also essentially doing proofs of humanity generating proof that you're a real life human being and not a bot on the internet. And so key long is this program to write these types of zero knowledge applications.

[00:24:55] And really the post quantum aspect of this is that unfortunately a lot of the zero knowledge applications that are being put into production today.

[00:25:05] They still rely on these pre quantum or vulnerable cryptographic systems. So many of them rely on on pairing based cryptography relies on elliptic curves and essentially what what what happens is when they're in production and if a quantum quantum computer comes along, they'll be able to forge.

[00:25:26] They'll be able to convince a verifier that you know some statement is true so they'll be able to to falsify essentially let's say identity or to say that they're there are a Canadian citizen without actually being a Canadian citizen.

[00:25:38] And you can kind of imagine where where this goes from if you're being very malicious. And so coming back to what you were saying just a second ago about doing all the heavy lifting off train to then bring the proof back on chain to make it more efficient.

[00:25:53] Just trying to send the motivation here is the idea that if you had a contract for example and it was very complex and required a lot of execution time, then if you hand over that decision making to a consensus algorithm out in the blockchain that all have to do a lot of hard work.

[00:26:13] So rather than give them that hard work you sort of do the pre computation to simplify it down to a much more trivial statement for them to solve or to answer is that right.

[00:26:24] That's exactly right. Yeah, yeah. So so you can really view blockchains as this kind of world computer right and if it's this world computer everybody's using it time on the world computer is going to be very expensive.

[00:26:36] And that's what people have seen in Ethereum for example kind of during the height of it that the gas fees were far more than or for more than what was actually being transacted.

[00:26:48] And again that's just because the time on this on this world computer to verify transactions even cost so much. And so if you're doing something, if you have this sophisticated complex smart contract that you're talking about Peter.

[00:27:01] Then you actually want like you want to do as much of that work off chain so that you can save as much time on chain where it's the most expensive and that's really where it's

[00:27:10] So how do I use this to prove that I'm human this is a deeply philosophical question.

[00:27:15] It could be it doesn't have to be as philosophical as that it could also just be some D gen D five trading, but it could also be for proofs of identity. Absolutely. Yeah. That is a zero knowledge Turing test. Yeah, exactly.

[00:27:34] So Chris, could you highlight some of BTQ's significant milestones since its inception and lay out the trajectory for the company. Yeah, so I've been fortunate to have been with BTQ pretty much since the beginning so I've been able to see it grow and mature over time.

[00:27:54] And so BTQ was really set out to secure these mission critical networks using post quantum cryptography. So everything that we've done has been kind of through the lens of being really underdogs in this in this kind of giant space.

[00:28:11] So what Nick or CEO said to do is he went to Taiwan, set up a world class team of post quantum cryptographic researchers there and then also went to Sydney, Australia and and also built a great team there.

[00:28:27] And I guess maybe our first actually our first interesting milestone was actually betting on these uncertainness or certain algorithms being centered as by this because we had started work.

[00:28:38] I remember trying to communicate this to investors saying, look, like we're doing this work and it's going to pay off. You just have to wait and see we've we have conviction and and our team just has the has the background to be able to support these these best that we're making.

[00:28:53] And sure enough, they ended up being standardized. And, you know, after these these standardizations were released, you know, we were able to say that we we delivered the first NIST compliant signature aggregation post quantum signature aggregation algorithm using PQ scale. So that was another huge milestone.

[00:29:13] Then we also were also since being in Taiwan. We have access to world class semiconductor manufacturing facilities like TSMC through our relationship to E tree, which is Taiwan's research Institute. So we've been able to do several typos there and really be a first mover in accelerating these.

[00:29:34] Yeah, these hardware implementations for zero knowledge or post quantum zero knowledge proving systems. And then also in Sydney led by you guys have done some amazing research on quantum based consensus.

[00:29:49] Kind of, you can think about it's like a quantum proof of work for Bitcoin and yeah potentially very plausibly the first commercial use case for these quantum computers on these kind of affordable and powerful and this devices.

[00:30:05] As you've been alluding to just now a big part of BTQ's focuses on research, not just in terms of buying it from other people but but actually being a novel producer of original academic type research. And that requires a lot of different partnerships.

[00:30:23] You got some universities all around the world involved in the research projects. A big one in the private sector recently is the Hon Hai Research Institute. Can you tell us about that and what that means for BTQ and the whole ecosystem that it's part of?

[00:30:42] Yeah, yeah, it's absolutely huge for us. We've been entrusted by, you know, one of the largest companies in the world with one of the longest histories in electronics manufacturing to conduct the sophisticated research in post quantum cryptography.

[00:31:01] Specifically so what we're doing with them is we're optimizing these algorithms into hardware and this comes back to our Q-SIM product.

[00:31:10] So the idea here is that we can actually get a lot of acceleration benefits by changing the type of hardware architecture that we use to develop these systems.

[00:31:22] For the longest time the world has been using this von Neumann architecture which kind of like topologically separates like memory, CPU and then kind of like long and then like SSD or like long term memory.

[00:31:35] And I mean that's been fantastic and it's gotten us through years of Moore's Law where we've been up to faster and faster computers. But really we've kind of hit this bottleneck in this being constrained to this architecture, this hardware architecture.

[00:31:52] So what we're doing there is we're actually moving this like the computation units as close to memory as possible so that we don't need to shuttle data through this tiny bus which is on the right.

[00:32:04] So oftentimes a bottleneck in hardware when a lot of data needs to go through a little bus to get to another part of the circuit, of the motherboard. So yeah we've been working with Honhai to accelerate these post quantum algorithms using this novel compute and memory architecture.

[00:32:24] Yeah so we talked a little bit about the fact that NIST is moving towards post quantum encryption standards and quantum computers at some point you know BTQ is kind of based around the idea that quantum computers are coming they will break all encryption right.

[00:32:41] But like you mentioned there's some blockchains and some people in the industry that are kind of in a holding pattern with moving to encryption.

[00:32:49] So what's kind of the company stance on when that will happen? What will be that driver for people to actually transition to post quantum crypto? Yeah we're hoping that people will be kind of paying attention to what's happening around the world.

[00:33:08] I like to characterize this as the situation that we're in right now I like to characterize this being sitting in the middle of these two walls that are coming in towards each other and they're closing in increasingly faster.

[00:33:22] On one hand we have quantum hardware which keeps getting better and better. Year over year there's more investments into the research and development of quantum hardware and essentially we're seeing some very rapid improvements in the hardware.

[00:33:40] So on that one hand we have the hardware moving in and then on the other hand we also have I guess optimizations to quantum algorithms.

[00:33:47] It seems like we're able to build algorithms that are far more efficient than they were before just again purely because of how much attention is being focused on the area.

[00:33:58] And so yeah we're kind of what it's kind of the inflection point is when we as when the quantum hardware meets the quantum software that we actually have hardware that we're able to run these algorithms on.

[00:34:11] And so this holding pattern won't last for long and that's really what we're trying to communicate to companies is saying the pace is picking up and of quantum development. And we have the tools now to make us future proof.

[00:34:33] We just need to work with you guys to understand your business requirements and also give us feedback on what we're building so that you can implement this and become quantum secure.

[00:34:48] So if you do like a YouTube search on post quantum crypto like one of the things that comes up is lattice based crypto and quantum resistant and they'll just show pictures of trying to find that short of lattice factor. And some kind of national space.

[00:35:08] Can you can you provide a little insights into this.

[00:35:11] Yeah so I guess like the the non mathematical insight would be it's it's excess so far so we've talked about the next standardizations and two out of the three digital signature algorithms came from this lattice based family lattice based cryptography.

[00:35:31] So it's it's done pretty well so far and the kind of approach that we've taken is that, well, we understand the mathematical properties of lattices and they provide some nice properties that we can take advantage of to essentially combat the tradeoffs and size and the speed of these more expensive

[00:35:52] post quantum algorithms.

[00:35:54] So that's where most of our work has been, you know, across the stack from research standardizations hardware and software. We've been looking at how we can leverage the properties of lattice based cryptography to make them faster and cheaper so that as we said before team or companies can implement them

[00:36:12] today and hopefully not feel the burden of the cost on the topic of lattice cryptography. This is a particular class of mathematical transformations that to the best of our understanding corner computers can't find any structure into exploit and therefore compromise.

[00:36:33] What actual confidence do we have that these lattice problems are likely to be robust intrinsically against corner computers versus we just believe it because it hasn't been found yet keeping in mind that when shores algorithm was discovered that kind of took everybody off guard to and

[00:36:51] have hadn't have been discovered. We'd probably still be sitting here thinking that RSA and ECC are just fine. Right, right, right. Yeah, so I think a question that's often asked by people are is, is there any proof that these standardized algorithms are actually going to be quantum secure.

[00:37:09] And to the best of my knowledge, there is not any formal proof it's kind of depends it's it's us relying on. I like to think about it and I think Peter as well you've done a really good job.

[00:37:20] Kind of contextualizing all this in the in the framework of complexity classes like computational complexity classes where the problems that we that we assumed to be difficult, and therefore we chose to underpin the security of our crypto systems at the time were far

[00:37:40] enough outside of our class of of our class at the time of competition. I guess capabilities at the time, but they happen to lie within the class of BQP, which I guess is the class of efficiently solvable problems by quantum computers.

[00:37:58] And so what post quantum cryptography or with these algorithms do is they rely on problems that lie outside of the complexity class of BQP. So we're just kind of removing ourselves one more step from from where we were before.

[00:38:13] And again, there's no formal proof that these will be secure 100 years 1000 years down the road.

[00:38:19] But they seem to be secure for now and this all depends on the types of algorithms that we can build to determine whether we can actually efficiently solve them in a in a realistic amount of time.

[00:38:32] Yeah, so we mentioned NIST a lot. We mentioned the collaborations. It's really an interesting time because right now in quantum, we're still all mostly friends, even though we work on, you know, maybe competing technologies.

[00:38:46] But there is a lot of global collaboration going on. And so what's your take on kind of the the surge in quantum tech startups investments and do you think we're going in the right direction of what we're investing in in quantum technologies?

[00:39:02] Yeah, so there's been a huge surge. I was looking at some numbers for for a national quantum spending and or sorry, national, sorry, I should say government spending and quant in the development of quantum technologies. So we saw 23 billion in 2023.

[00:39:20] Sorry, 2022 and then for 2023 last year we saw 39 billion. So it really highlights like how much of a national national priority this is for for governments around the world. And then also equivalently in the private sector there's been a ton of investments into quantum computing.

[00:39:39] I mean, it makes sense. It's a quantum and I think Peter and Gavin you guys can probably speak to this a little bit better, but it seems like a very promising technology in terms of the breakthroughs that it has on certain problems.

[00:39:51] And, you know, for and it also kind of unlocks this whole new competing paradigm we're able to solve problems that, you know, are quantum in nature far more efficiently than than with our classical computers up right now.

[00:40:03] I mean, this kind of opens up the solution space to different problems to, yeah, to have very, very real impacts. So it seems like it's a good investment. Yeah, I mean I'm also curious to hear what you guys think.

[00:40:16] Yeah, I think a lot of the some people say well remember the hype graphene had so many years ago and nothing came without what if the same thing happens for quantum computers I mean we've all been in the field pretty long time and obviously have committed a lot of work to the

[00:40:33] field so I don't think any of us again correct me if I'm wrong or thinking it's not going to happen. But yeah it is especially interesting right because there's kind of the pathway of the quantum computing side which is new materials drug development, a lot of cool innovation

[00:40:48] but at the same time we have to temper that with the security side. So it makes sense governments are going towards that right but sometimes I wonder why we're not being shut down a little bit by the government right being like you know maybe slow

[00:41:03] maybe don't need to scale to like shores algorithm, you know levels of chips maybe stayed 100 perfect qubits and that's all you have to care about who needs 1000 who needs 10,000.

[00:41:13] So yeah it's very interesting the government spending is very high. The government, you know I get a lot of comments on social media that government is stupid right no they have a lot of deep technology deep interest in it that, you know a lot of their future plans depends on this technology.

[00:41:32] Whereas the everyday person will not be using quantum computer all the time but they will be affected by the advancements and then also from the investment side we talked to Nick Farina a little bit on another podcast episode just, you know just the level of folks investing in the space

[00:41:46] like you have to be very technical to invest in the space so you see this kind of a lot weirder. I think funding skew towards the government side.

[00:41:56] So it's very interesting I'm not sure if there's anything I've really seen that's on that level. Like even blockchain right like the idea is that it's too late now but like the government could have gotten involved in blockchain right and would have been a very different outcome and now what are they going to do.

[00:42:11] Yeah well now we're kind of seeing them invest in blockchain or research blockchain through the lens of digital currencies. But yeah to your point of this being like it almost feels like a space race where quantum technology is this is this it gives you a lot of power and you're able to

[00:42:29] get a lot of power internationally. If you have a quantum computer so we're kind of seeing this as like global quantum space race. And maybe that's like one of the reasons why it's such a national priority, like because one of the most well understood algorithms in quantum

[00:42:45] technology is has to do with breaking cryptography. If you want, I mean, essentially if you were a nation state and you had the ability to undermine any other countries, cryptography you can undermine their financial ecosystem, you know almost any

[00:43:00] country that's digital which is almost every industry these days. And so it really does seem like a national security effort which is really how I think that the White House has been painting this it's a national security issue and as such it gets a lot of funding for

[00:43:17] What's BTQ's take on what the demands are in the economy and the marketplace for the post quantum transition in cryptography and what BTQ's responses to that and how it supports that. Now I don't just mean only in the context of the fact that we're changing cryptographic standards but also there's a big shift in how they're being employed.

[00:43:42] We've spoken a lot about blockchains and servers doing big complex off chain calculations. But in the next 10 years, I think probably the vast majority of electronic goods using cryptography will be things like the Internet of Things where your kitchen kettle is, you know, on your local network.

[00:44:05] Everything imaginable the whole structure of what the demand is for cryptography is going to be changing as well with different technological requirements.

[00:44:15] Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so it seems like so I guess at a macro perspective, almost every industry is moving to be more digital. And it's really what we've seen over the past 1015 years is that data is really king.

[00:44:30] So you're able to consume data via Internet of Things devices, IoT devices. Essentially you can think about things, you know, wearables, things out in the middle of farms collecting, you know, data on weather patterns and how crops are doing to, you know, these like satellite, these satellite devices that are constantly sending and receiving traffic.

[00:44:54] And so I think the world understands that, okay, digitizing their business is top of mind. What a lot of companies over the past couple of years have kind of struggled with is the security underpinning them.

[00:45:11] And what's helped with this is the fact that the US has been leading and been very vocal about being a leader in these post quantum standardizations, so that essentially all American companies and government organizations will be resistant against these attacks.

[00:45:29] And so it seems like companies are now, you know, as these standardizations are being rolled out, they're more open to discussing what does onboarding PQC look like.

[00:45:43] And yeah, as you've said, we've, there's a whole kind of range of applications and different solutions that you need. You have these large kind of like centralized data centers that can use one type of cryptography.

[00:45:58] But then at the other end of the spectrum, you have these IoT devices, which don't have a lot of they don't have access to large amounts of compute, but they still need to be they still need to protect encrypt sign their data that they're dealing with because this is deeply valuable and oftentimes very personal information.

[00:46:17] And how do you envision BTQ's solution shaping the future of digital security, especially as we're, you know, every few months now we're hearing about advances in quantum computing.

[00:46:32] So how are you keeping up with that and where do you think is going to be pick up from the classical digital security community?

[00:46:43] Yeah, yeah. So yeah, we love talking to people to see where they are on their roadmap. That's something that we do very often we check in with a bunch of teams that we work with partners companies and we ask them you know like how far are you into your transition to PQC?

[00:47:02] What kind of obstacles are you running into? It's funny I was just at a conference last week, a crypto financial conference and the like the large, I guess a large number of attendees there hold like quite large bags of Bitcoin.

[00:47:18] They have like more Bitcoin than I could ever dream of having.

[00:47:22] And when I was, I mean obviously there on a path BTQ and sharing the work that we're doing on post-chronic cryptography, the probably the most number one response that I got was I'm trying not to think about it.

[00:47:35] Like I'm trying not to imagine a world with with quantum computers because you know a lot of people don't know what their Bitcoin looks like for example in that in that world.

[00:47:45] So yeah, and then also there was we were also at the Bank of International Settlements at a conference on cybersecurity for CBDCs.

[00:47:57] And they're at least like the like these banks are thinking about it, but they don't know how to solve it so they know that they were aware of this problem of quantum computers. They know that they need to integrate post-chronic cryptography.

[00:48:10] And yeah, we like we talked about this research that they had done where the effects that it has on on the duration of payments and throughput, but they just have no idea how to solve it.

[00:48:21] And so yeah, I feel like we're in a really good position to capitalize on this because we have a very, yeah it's a fast union world.

[00:48:30] We have kind of yet quantum coming up AIs hit a boom and you know who knows what that would impact that has on the future rate of development for quantum computers and also just kind of like security risks.

[00:48:43] And there's a lot of and like again, like an increasingly digitized economy. So yeah, we feel like we're in a really good position to deliver a really clear solution to companies on how they can transition to PQC in a affordable and cost effective way.

[00:48:59] Chris, so what are BTQ's predictions for the evolution of these PQC standards? Lots of standards to evolve over time.

[00:49:07] And when it comes to the PQC standards that we've been talking about, this is the very first time any of them have ever been standardized and they may change based on future vulnerabilities on whatever sort of side channel attacks anything.

[00:49:21] How does that affect the whole evolution of how things progress? And how do you future proof yourself against that? Yeah, so we've talked about the NIST launching their fourth round. Essentially this call for additional submissions.

[00:49:38] And so they're taking into account this possibility that some of the currently standardized algorithms will be broken in the future.

[00:49:46] So kind of what we're foreseeing as being the evolution of these PQC standards is that the NIST will standardize alternatives to the lattice based and hash based algorithms that they currently have. And so they'll be looking for essentially algorithms from different families of cryptography.

[00:50:08] And hopefully that's where Prion can shine because again it differs. It's the first azike based digital signature algorithm and varies quite a bit from the other submissions. And yeah, as for kind of how do we steer or like how does what is the general narrative for quantum resistance?

[00:50:33] I mean, I think most people understand that it's possible. You also now have other countries like Korea they're going through their own standardizations efforts and you have researchers around the world working together to create new standards.

[00:50:47] And the nice thing about this is that we'll also have a lot of diversity between countries, which means that we can borrow on the learnings and failures of people around the world and adapt as needed.

[00:51:01] And so I think this idea of quantum resistance is very much possible and feasible. We just need to build it together. So you mentioned that some people are trying not to think about the post-colonial world, but they got to start doing it.

[00:51:16] So what is the call to action for businesses? Who do you hope to see in your future partnerships? Who do you hope to see getting involved and which industries in the research solutions and actually moving towards the PQC side?

[00:51:30] Yeah, so we I guess our genesis of trying to secure these mission critical networks. We love working with telecom networks, with banks, with anyone who really provides these services that are critical to the very fabric of our societies.

[00:51:50] So looking for partnerships there and our goal is that we can see a world where post-quantum photography underpins everything that we do, but nobody really notices. So we really, and all the solutions that we're building where we try to make these algorithms smaller, cheaper, more affordable.

[00:52:12] This is all an effort to help people and businesses conduct business as usual without noticing all the complex cryptography and engineering that goes on underneath them. And so we feel like if we're able to do this, then we will have done our job well.

[00:52:29] I always say right now, if you want to make a lot of money, you should learn COBOL because there's a lot of old systems running a lot of old cryptography that needs to be upgraded. So that's a fantastic goal.

[00:52:40] So Chris, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It was great to have you explain all this and get your viewpoints. This is Chris Tam, head of partnerships at BTQ. And thank you Peter and Gavin for co-hosting with me.

[00:52:53] And thank you to our listeners for listening to this podcast. You can find us on YouTube, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. So make sure to like and comment if you're on YouTube and make sure to listen to our next episodes. Thank you so much.