How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Quantumpocalypse

Like other modern, geographically distributed organizations, software development teams rely on the ability to move information seamlessly and reliably across the internet, including specifications, documentation, and code. Inherent to this is the expectation that online communications will be confidential between the parties, that the parties can trust that the information hasn’t been tampered with, and that it is authentic relative to senders and receivers.

To date, this expectation has been guaranteed by protocols reliant on classical asymmetric cryptographic algorithms. However, it is anticipated that within five years quantum computers of sufficient power to break these algorithms will be available. As a result, the security fabric underpinning distributed and collaborative software development will be rendered obsolete, giving attackers the ability to intercept software while it is in development, and, potentially worse, change code to permit malicious exploitation – all without legitimate parties’ awareness.
This session discusses the elements of quantum computing and classical computing that create the emerging threat to secure software development, the current state of cryptography, and achievable, readily implementable solution paths to secure the software development ecosystem.