Latest / Cybersecurity Business with Fexingo: Security Companies, Breaches, and Enterprise Defense / How CISOs Are Using Quantum-Safe Cryptography Now
Transcript
- Lucas: So later this month, JPMorgan Chase is going to begin encrypting a portion of its interbank data transmissions using something called crystals kyber. That's a lattice-based key encapsulation mechanism, and it's one of the post-quantum cryptographic algorithms that NIST standardized back in 2024. Luna: Wait — they're already deploying quantum-safe crypto? I thought quantum computers that can break RSA were still years away. Lucas: They are. But the banking sector operates on a ten-year planning horizon, and the migration to quantum-safe cryptography is going to take at least that long. If you wait until a cryptographically relevant quantum computer exists, you've already lost. Lucas: The term people use is 'harvest now, decrypt later.' Adversaries can collect encrypted data today and store it. Once they have a quantum computer, they decrypt the archive. So any data that needs to stay confidential for a decade or more needs to be protected against future quantum attacks right now. Luna: That's a really concrete threat model. And JPMorgan's move makes sense — they have long-lived data like M&A documents, proprietary trading algorithms, client records. Lucas: Exactly. And if these conversations are useful for what you're building or running, listener support is what keeps this show ad-free. You can find us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure, just helps us keep the episodes coming. Luna: Yeah, absolutely. So back to the crypto timeline — NIST standardized three algorithms in 2024: crystals kyber for key exchange, and crystals dilithium and SPHINCS+ for digital signatures. The banking industry latched onto Kyber first because key encapsulation is the most urgent use case. Lucas: Right. And the challenge isn't just picking an algorithm. It's the migration itself. Every system that uses public-key cryptography — TLS, code signing, firmware updates, authentication tokens, document signing — has to be updated. We're talking about hundreds of millions of cryptographic keys across a global bank. Luna: So how do you even start? Do you rip and replace, or overlay? Lucas: The smartest approach is what's called crypto-agility. You design your systems so that cryptographic primitives are pluggable — you can swap out algorithms without touching the whole application. JPMorgan is using a hybrid model: they're sending both a classic elliptic curve key and a Kyber key in the same handshake. The security of the channel relies on the stronger of the two. Luna: That makes sense for the transition period. But a hybrid approach doubles the computational cost, right? Lucas: It does. Lattice-based cryptography is already more compute-heavy than RSA or ECC. For a bank processing millions of transactions per second, that's a real cost. But the trade-off is that you get forward secrecy against quantum attacks immediately, and you don't lose backwards compatibility with existing infrastructure. Luna: So what's the actual timeline? When do CISOs need to have this done by? Lucas: The consensus is that a cryptographically relevant quantum computer — one that can break 2048-bit RSA in under 24 hours — is likely 10 to 15 years out. But the migration itself takes 5 to 10 years for a large enterprise. So the window to start is now. The US government has mandated that all federal agencies must migrate to post-quantum crypto by 2035. The private sector is less regulated, but financial regulators are starting to ask about quantum risk in their cybersecurity questionnaires. Luna: I know that the UK's National Cyber Security Centre has published guidance recommending that organizations start inventorying their cryptographic assets today. They call it 'cryptographic discovery' — figuring out where all the keys and certificates live. Lucas: That's step one. And it's harder than it sounds. Most enterprises don't have a complete inventory of their cryptographic assets. They've got code-signing certificates in build pipelines, device certificates in IoT fleets, internal PKI that's been running for 15 years with no documentation. A crypto inventory project can take a year on its own. Luna: And that's just for classical crypto. Managing hybrid certificates that contain both an RSA key and a Dilithium signature adds a whole new layer of complexity. Lucas: Right. Certificate authorities are already offering hybrid certificates. Let's Encrypt, DigiCert, GlobalSign — they all have post-quantum options now. But you need a chain of trust that supports both the old and new algorithms. And your internal systems need to know how to handle the larger certificate sizes. A Kyber key is about 800 bytes, compared to 256 bytes for an ECDH key. That might not sound like a lot, but when you have thousands of handshakes per second, the bandwidth adds up. Luna: So what are the early adopters seeing in terms of performance? Is it production-ready? Lucas: For certain use cases, yes. JPMorgan's deployment is in a controlled environment — it's not yet on their public-facing customer portals. They're using it for backend interbank messaging where latency tolerance is a few hundred milliseconds. The performance hit is about 20 to 30 percent on the handshake. For a real-time trading system, that might be unacceptable. But for batch data transfer, it's fine. Luna: So the first wave of quantum-safe deployment is in the backend, not the frontend. Lucas: Exactly. And that's smart. You want to prove the technology in a lower-risk environment first. The second wave will be customer-facing TLS, then code signing, then firmware updates. The third wave is IoT and embedded systems, where the computational constraints are tightest. Luna: I've heard that some hardware security modules — HSMs — are already being certified with support for post-quantum algorithms. Thales and Utimaco have announced roadmaps. Lucas: They have. But replacing HSMs across a global bank is a multi-year capital project. The HSM itself might cost $10,000, but the integration and compliance testing across hundreds of applications is the expensive part. That's why the planning horizon is so long. Luna: Let's talk about the NIST standards themselves. Kyber and Dilithium are lattice-based. What makes lattice cryptography resistant to quantum attack? Lucas: Lattice-based problems are hard for both classical and quantum computers. The best known attacks on lattice problems require exponential time, even with a quantum computer. That's different from factoring or discrete logarithm, which Shor's algorithm can solve in polynomial time on a quantum machine. So lattice-based crypto is currently considered safe. But there's always the risk that a new quantum algorithm or a classical breakthrough could weaken it. Luna: That's the uncertainty that keeps CISOs up at night. You pick a standard, but the maths might not hold forever. Lucas: And that's exactly why crypto-agility is so critical. If a weakness is found in Kyber five years from now, you need to be able to swap to another algorithm — maybe one based on isogenies or code-based cryptography. NIST is already running a second round of standardization for additional algorithms. If you've built your systems to be crypto-agile, that swap is a configuration change, not a multi-year rewrite. Luna: So the real takeaway for enterprises isn't 'migrate to this one algorithm.' It's 'build the muscle to change algorithms quickly.' Lucas: Exactly. The migration to post-quantum cryptography is not a one-time event. It's the beginning of a new era in crypto lifecycle management. We spent the last 20 years standardizing on RSA and ECC. For the next 20 years, we're going to see algorithm churn as the community gains confidence in new constructions. Crypto-agility is the only viable long-term strategy. Luna: So for a CISO listening to this, what's the first actionable step? Lucas: Start your cryptographic inventory tomorrow. Not next quarter. Use a tool like Venafi or Keyfactor to scan your network for all TLS certificates, code-signing certificates, SSH keys, and any embedded crypto. That inventory will tell you the scope of the migration. Then prioritize the data that needs long-term confidentiality — customer PII, trade secrets, classified data — and start testing hybrid certificate deployment on a non-critical system. You want to build institutional knowledge now, so that when the mandate comes, you're not starting from scratch. Luna: It sounds like the banks are ahead, but what about other industries? Are we seeing adoption outside finance? Lucas: The technology sector is moving fast. Cloudflare, Google, Amazon — they've all deployed post-quantum crypto in some form for internal traffic. But for the average enterprise, it's still on the radar but not yet a major line item in the budget. Healthcare and defense are starting to look at it because of regulatory pressure and the sensitivity of their data. Retail and hospitality are further behind. Luna: Interesting. So the gap between early adopters and the rest of the market is widening. Lucas: It is. And that gap creates risk. If your competitors are encrypting their supply chain data with quantum-safe crypto today, and you're not, you're leaving yourself exposed to harvest now decrypt later attacks. It's not an immediate breach risk, but it's a strategic risk. In five years, your five-year-old encrypted data will be vulnerable. Luna: That's the argument that gets CFOs to pay attention — you're not securing today's data against today's threats. You're securing today's data against tomorrow's threats. Lucas: Right. And the cost of migration goes up the longer you wait. The sooner you start, the more you can spread the cost across normal upgrade cycles. If you wait until 2030, you'll have to do a crash migration that will disrupt operations and cost far more. Luna: So the message is: start now, start small, but start. Lucas: Exactly. This is a marathon, not a sprint. But the first mile of the marathon is cryptographic inventory and a pilot deployment. And that's something any CISO can begin in the next 90 days.