The Role of Technology Vendors in Your Quantum-Safe Migration
Who is responsible for migrating your systems to quantum-safe algorithms? Is it your vendors or your cybersecurity team?
The customers I speak to are not always clear on this question. But from my perspective, the answer is your cybersecurity team. They have the ultimate responsibility of ensuring your organization is secure in a post-quantum future. However, they will need a lot of help from your technology vendors.
This article outlines what you should expect (or demand) from your vendors, and what remains the responsibility of your cyber team.
What To Expect From General Vendors
A general vendor does not offer specific cryptographic services to you. Instead, they provide a business service that uses cryptography to maintain security and resilience.
Consider the accounting platform SAP. It is no doubt riddled with cryptography, yet its purpose is to manage your finances. Therefore, SAP’s focus will be on migrating their underlying cryptography to post-quantum technologies, while maintaining your business services without interruption.
You should expect a general vendor to share a quantum-safe migration roadmap with you, complete with timelines. They should explain the activities they will complete to address the quantum threat, and how they will impact you as a user.
Although your vendor will not begin migration until the NIST post-quantum algorithms are standardised next year, you should expect them to already have a roadmap in place. If they don’t, this is a cause for concern.
Some vendors may already offer a test version of their product, which uses post-quantum algorithms. This allows your cyber team to experiment with the impact on performance or interoperability.
What To Expect From Cryptographic Vendors
A cryptographic vendor provides you with services directly related to cryptography, such as network security, data encryption or key management.
The expectations that apply to general vendors also apply to cryptographic vendors. However, you will need more information from your cryptographic vendors to pull off a smooth migration.
Cryptographic vendors must provide you with detailed guidance on how to migrate between their current product suite and the new versions that use post-quantum algorithms. For instance, you might need to understand how to re-process legacy data so that it’s protected by the new algorithms. Similarly, network security vendors will need to provide detailed instructions on migrating traffic flows while maintaining uptime.
I would expect cryptographic vendors to be far more hands-on during your migration. Expect to have discussions of your deployment architecture with their account management teams, and don’t be afraid to ask the hard technical questions.
What Information You Should be Ready to Share
The flow of information will not be one-way. You should be prepared to share information with your vendors to help them help you.
Having your migration plan developed, at least at a high level, will be critical for meaningful conversations with your vendors. This will allow you to contrast their timelines for migration versus your expectations.
Vendors will also benefit from understanding how you use their products in conjunction with products from other vendors. The goal here is to spot edge cases, where you risk business downtime because the vendor wasn’t anticipating how you were using their product.
Finally, make sure you know the configuration of your deployment. The devil is in the details when it comes to planning migration, so be prepared to tell your vendor which features you are using and how you’ve configured product security settings.
What is Out of Scope for Your Vendor?
While your vendors should provide a lot of help and guidance, they are not responsible for everything.
Your cybersecurity team will be responsible for planning your overall migration strategy, including prioritising which systems to migrate first. This will involve understanding the relative importance of business systems, and the requirements for data security.
While vendors should provide some guidance for interoperability, ultimately the IT and cybersecurity teams are responsible for ensuring updates to one service do not impact another service.
Finally, you must ensure your IT and cyber teams are leading the conversation with your end users. You cannot rely on vendors to manage the communication with your customers and internal stakeholders.
What Should You Expect to See Today?
A good vendor will already be talking to you about their plans for quantum-safe migration.
For mass-market products, this might be via blog posts and thought-leadership articles. For products with a deeper client/vendor relationship, the topic of quantum-safe migration should already be appearing in quarterly business reviews.
For cryptographic vendors, you should also be expecting test versions to be available today, to allow for experimentation.
Overall, if any vendor is not able to talk about their plans for quantum-safe migration today, even at a high level, then you should flag this as a cause for concern.
About Quantinuum
Quantinuum, the world’s largest integrated quantum company, pioneers powerful quantum computers and advanced software solutions. Quantinuum’s technology drives breakthroughs in materials discovery, cybersecurity, and next-gen quantum AI. With over 500 employees, including 370+ scientists and engineers, Quantinuum leads the quantum computing revolution across continents.
At this year’s Q2B Silicon Valley conference from December 10th – 12th in Santa Clara, California, the Quantinuum team will be participating in plenary and case study sessions to showcase our quantum computing technologies.
Schedule a meeting with us at Q2B
Meet our team at Booth #G9 to discover how Quantinuum is charting the path to universal, fully fault-tolerant quantum computing.
Join our sessions:
Tuesday, Dec 10, 10:00 - 10:20am PT
Plenary: Advancements in Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computation: Demonstrations and Results
There is industry-wide consensus on the need for fault-tolerant QPU’s, but demonstrations of these abilities are less common. In this talk, Dr. Hayes will review Quantinuum’s long list of meaningful demonstrations in fault-tolerance, including real-time error correction, a variety of codes from the surface code to exotic qLDPC codes, logical benchmarking, beyond break-even behavior on multiple codes and circuit families.
Wednesday, Dec 11, 4:30 – 4:50pm PT
Keynote: Quantum Tokens: Securing Digital Assets with Quantum Physics
Mitsui’s Deputy General Manager, Quantum Innovation Dept., Corporate Development Div., Koji Naniwada, and Quantinuum’s Head of Cybersecurity, Duncan Jones will deliver a keynote presentation on a case study for quantum in cybersecurity. Together, our organizations demonstrated the first implementation of quantum tokens over a commercial QKD network. Quantum tokens enable three previously incompatible properties: unforgeability guaranteed by physics, fast settlement without centralized validation, and user privacy until redemption. We present results from our successful Tokyo trial using NEC's QKD commercial hardware and discuss potential applications in financial services.
Wednesday, Dec 11, 5:10 – 6:10pm PT
Quantinuum and Mitsui Sponsored Happy Hour
Join the Quantinuum and Mitsui teams in the expo hall for a networking happy hour.
Particle accelerator projects like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) don’t just smash particles - they also power the invention of some of the world’s most impactful technologies. A favorite example is the world wide web, which was developed for particle physics experiments at CERN.
Tech designed to unlock the mysteries of the universe has brutally exacting requirements – and it is this boundary pushing, plus billion-dollar budgets, that has led to so much innovation.
For example, X-rays are used in accelerators to measure the chemical composition of the accelerator products and to monitor radiation. The understanding developed to create those technologies was then applied to help us build better CT scanners, reducing the x-ray dosage while improving the image quality.
Stories like this are common in accelerator physics, or High Energy Physics (HEP). Scientists and engineers working in HEP have been early adopters and/or key drivers of innovations in advanced cancer treatments (using proton beams), machine learning techniques, robots, new materials, cryogenics, data handling and analysis, and more.
A key strand of HEP research aims to make accelerators simpler and cheaper. A key piece of infrastructure that could be improved is their computing environments.
CERN itself has said: “CERN is one of the most highly demanding computing environments in the research world... From software development, to data processing and storage, networks, support for the LHC and non-LHC experimental programme, automation and controls, as well as services for the accelerator complex and for the whole laboratory and its users, computing is at the heart of CERN’s infrastructure.”
With annual data generated by accelerators in excess of exabytes (a billion gigabytes), tens of millions of lines of code written to support the experiments, and incredibly demanding hardware requirements, it’s no surprise that the HEP community is interested in quantum computing, which offers real solutions to some of their hardest problems.
As the authors of this paper stated: “[Quantum Computing] encompasses several defining characteristics that are of particular interest to experimental HEP: the potential for quantum speed-up in processing time, sensitivity to sources of correlations in data, and increased expressivity of quantum systems... Experiments running on high-luminosity accelerators need faster algorithms; identification and reconstruction algorithms need to capture correlations in signals; simulation and inference tools need to express and calculate functions that are classically intractable.”
The HEP community’s interest in quantum computing is growing. In recent years, their scientists have been looking carefully at how quantum computing could help them, publishing a number of papers discussing the challenges and requirements for quantum technology to make a dent (here’s one example, and here’s the arXiv version).
In the past few months, what was previously theoretical is becoming a reality. Several groups published results using quantum machines to tackle something called “Lattice Gauge Theory”, which is a type of math used to describe a broad range of phenomena in HEP (and beyond). Two papers came from academic groups using quantum simulators, one using trapped ions and one using neutral atoms. Another group, including scientists from Google, tackled Lattice Gauge Theory using a superconducting quantum computer. Taken together, these papers indicate a growing interest in using quantum computing for High Energy Physics, beyond simple one-dimensional systems which are more easily accessible with classical methods such as tensor networks.
We have been working with DESY, one of the world’s leading accelerator centers, to help make quantum computing useful for their work. DESY, short for Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron, is a national research center that operates, develops, and constructs particle accelerators, and is part of the worldwide computer network used to store and analyze the enormous flood of data that is produced by the LHC in Geneva.
Our first publication from this partnership describes a quantum machine learning technique for untangling data from the LHC, finding that in some cases the quantum approach was indeed superior to the classical approach. More recently, we used Quantinuum System Model H1 to tackle Lattice Gauge Theory (LGT), as it’s a favorite contender for quantum advantage in HEP.
Lattice Gauge Theories are one approach to solving what are more broadly referred to as “quantum many-body problems”. Quantum many-body problems lie at the border of our knowledge in many different fields, such as the electronic structure problem which impacts chemistry and pharmaceuticals, or the quest for understanding and engineering new material properties such as light harvesting materials; to basic research such as high energy physics, which aims to understand the fundamental constituents of the universe, or condensed matter physics where our understanding of things like high-temperature superconductivity is still incomplete.
The difficulty in solving problems like this – analytically or computationally – is that the problem complexity grows exponentially with the size of the system. For example, there are 36 possible configurations of two six-faced dice (1 and 1 or 1 and 2 or 1and 3... etc), while for ten dice there are more than sixty million configurations.
Quantum computing may be very well-suited to tackling problems like this, due to a quantum processor’s similar information density scaling – with the addition of a single qubit to a QPU, the information the system contains doubles. Our 56-qubit System Model H2, for example, can hold quantum states that require 128*(2^56) bits worth of information to describe (with double-precision numbers) on a classical supercomputer, which is more information than the biggest supercomputer in the world can hold in memory.
The joint team made significant progress in approaching the Lattice Gauge Theory corresponding to Quantum Electrodynamics, the theory of light and matter. For the first time, they were able study the full wavefunction of a two-dimensional confining system with gauge fields and dynamical matter fields on a quantum processor. They were also able to visualize the confining string and the string-breaking phenomenon at the level of the wavefunction, across a range of interaction strengths.
The team approached the problem starting with the definition of the Hamiltonian using the InQuanto software package, and utilized the reusable protocols of InQuanto to compute both projective measurements and expectation values. InQuanto allowed the easy integration of measurement reduction techniques and scalable error mitigation techniques. Moreover, the emulator and hardware experiments were orchestrated by the Nexus online platform.
In one section of the study, a circuit with 24 qubits and more than 250 two-qubit gates was reduced to a smaller width of 15 qubits thanks our unique qubit re-use and mid-circuit measurement automatic compilation implemented in TKET.
This work paves the way towards using quantum computers to study lattice gauge theories in higher dimensions, with the goal of one day simulating the full three-dimensional Quantum Chromodynamics theory underlying the nuclear sector of the Standard Model of particle physics. Being able to simulate full 3D quantum chromodynamics will undoubtedly unlock many of Nature’s mysteries, from the Big Bang to the interior of neutron stars, and is likely to lead to applications we haven’t yet dreamed of.