Quantum Threats to Cryptography and Counter Measures: Dr William Blair

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Quantum Threats to Cryptography and Counter Measures: Dr William Blair Careers in Technology

Join us for an exciting session as our speaker—Dr William Blair--an expert in quantum computing and cryptography—walks us through the emerging quantum threat landscape. Learn how quantum algorithms like Shor’s and Grover’s challenge today’s cryptographic systems, and how the industry is responding with next-gen, quantum-resistant solutions. This talk will demystify core concepts in quantum computation and introduce NIST’s new cryptographic standards like ML-KEM and ML-DSA, offering practical insights into securing communication systems in the post-quantum era. Don’t miss this opportunity to get up to speed on one of the most pressing shifts in cybersecurity.

Careers in Technology


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  • Starts 26 June 2025 09:00 PM UTC
  • Ends 09 July 2025 07:00 AM UTC
  • No Admission Charge

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Quantum Threats to Cryptography and Counter Measures

Over thirty years ago, Quantum Computing transformed from a creative approach to efficiently simulate quantum mechanical systems to an attack vector for breaking the foundations of modern cryptography. Far from a purely theoretical exercise, many organizations now compete to transition from noisy intermediate scale quantum computers to fully fault tolerant quantum computers capable enough to run these attacks. This threat against modern cryptography, particularly widely used asymmetric cryptographic algorithms vital to computing and communication systems, has motivated the development of alternative algorithms that are resilient to quantum computers.
 
In this talk, we will provide an overview of the quantum threat to contemporary cryptographic schemes, including a basic overview of Quantum Computation and how major algorithms, including Shor's and Grover's algorithms, weaken widely used cryptography. An overview of counter measures to these attacks, including background on new cryptographic schemes standardized by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), will demonstrate how to secure communications and computer systems using algorithms that are believed to be resistant to quantum computers. These include the ML-KEM and ML-DSA standards, which rely on Module Learning with Errors (MLWE) to securely agree on ephemeral encryption keys and implement digital signatures, respectively. Alternative approaches, which achieve quantum resistance via Learning with Rounding (LWR) and cryptographic hash functions, will be briefly outlined as well.
 

Biography:

                                                                             

William Blair is a security researcher working in Washington DC. He is primarily interested in language-based, operating system, and hardware security. Since working on Oracle's Cryptography Review Board while at Oracle Labs, and before that interning at IBM Research, he has developed an interest in post-quantum cryptography. His research experience includes working on the GraalVM team at Oracle Labs, which involved supply chain security, control-flow integrity, hardware side-channel defenses, static binary analysis, and fuzz testing language runtimes. During graduate school, he had the opportunity to work on the Cyber Hunting at Scale (CHASE) DARPA program while interning with the Cyber Security Intelligence (CSI) group at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, and the Space and Time Analysis for Cybersecurity (STAC) DARPA program while at Boston University. He holds a PhD, MS, and BA in Computer Science from Boston University.

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