Exploring the Future of Quantum Computing and Security with Dave Krauthamer | Black Hat 2025

Hey, everyone. Welcome back. You know, we made it up from the show floor of Black Hat to our suite here in Las Vegas to do some a little bit quieter.

Hopefully the quality will be better for you. Um, I'm really happy to introduce you to Dave Heimer. Fair enough, fair Enough.

You say it for me. Krammer. K cr Hammerer.

Either way, Dave is here with us. And, uh, Dave, the company's called Q Secure. Yeah, Q Secure.

That's Q like Quantum. QU Secure. Yeah.

Yep. Quantum Secure. And, um, well, we're going to hear all about the company, Dave, but first let's hear a little bit about you.

Sure. Um, so again, Dave Coffer. I have a computer science background from before there were computers a long, long time ago, and I kind of spent a lot of time in it, became a Chief Information officer in telecom.

Um, and then I founded, uh, what became the, uh, Oracle's largest cloud partner services partner. So grew up in that kind of enterprise software realm. And I grew up in a very nerdy Caltech family, JPL family, and was always really fascinated with physics.

Um, although that didn't have a physics background. So we founded a company that was really focused on quantum computing, quantum algorithms and quantum development, and then pivoted into this quantum security paradigm that we've been doing since, uh, roughly 18, 19, 20 19. And just been having a really fun time.

But, um, just focusing in on creating new layers of security to protect us from current and future attacks. Un un that's fantastic. If you don't mind me asking Sure.

Asking what, what possessed you to this was what, about four or five years ago? Yeah. What possessed you four or five years ago to jump into quantum computing?

Uh, that's a, that's a great question, Alan. So, you know, like I said, I, I, I grew up in a very nerdy, you know, family. My mom was a college professor, and I was always really just fascinated with future next things, really exciting things that were occurring.

And they were kind of on the cusp of quantum computing becoming a real thing and what do you do with it? And so I've had some exits and I was in a good position to kind of do something really fun. Um, I founded the company with my daughter, who's now the CEO.

That's Fantastic. And it was just really a wonderful opportunity to focus on some really future cool stuff, make it a now thing, you know, work with my daughter and just do some cool things. Love it.

You know, it's funny, Dave, we're about the same age Yeah. And we've seen waves of technology, as you said, come and go in our time, not just go. 'cause technology never leaves, it doesn't fade away.

Right. Like Douglas MacArthur says about, you know, old generals. Um, it, it gets built into the foundation and then we build on top of it and on top of it and on top of it.

Yeah. Now, quantum, I, I have to admit, when I first became aware about quantum computing, it sounded Star Trek ish to me. Yeah.

You know what I mean? Yeah. And, um, I didn't think I would see it in my lifetime, let alone in my work and career.

Yeah. But then again, I didn't think I'd see artificial intelligence In your career. Yeah.

In my career, I, or in here we are. Um, there's so many aspects to quantum computing. I was actually talking to a friend of my John Willis today who's doing a book on quantum computing.

He's telling me he's about 150 pages into this book. And he said, Alan, you don't realize how long this has been sort of a, a holy grail, if you will, because it could do everything and nothing all at the same time, so to speak. Absolutely.

Um, I think for a lot of our audience out here, they don't, they don't understand Yeah. What quantum really brings. Sure.

I I think probably the easiest use case is the security post quantum encryption that we hear about and stuff like that. But Dave, if you don't mind, let's pick your brain a little bit Sure. With our audience when we talk about quantum computing.

Yeah. You know, we toss around terms like qubits Yeah. We, you know, and, and the whole non-binary kind of being both a one and a zero at the same time kind of thing.

Yeah. But what are we really, what does it really mean? Where does the rubber meet the road for our audience?

That's a great question. So when we talk about conventional computing, conventional computing processes, a, a transaction or a word really fast, and these transactions are like 64 bits. You've heard of a 64 Sure.

Bit computer. So I process 64 bits worth of information at a time, which is great. We've figured out how to do that really fast.

But it's linear in nature, meaning it goes from step to step to step, which is good for a lot of problems. But, you know, in the Venn diagram of problems, there's all these problems out here that you can't solve linearly, um, hacking RSA as one of them because it's prime to refactor. Right.

So, just if the quantum thing is, computing is really simple, it takes that word of 64 bits and a qubit, which is like a quantum bit. It's basically an atom. A qubit is an atom.

Mm-hmm. And when I create a word of 64 bit word outta 64 qubits, instead of being 64 bits, it's 64 2 to the 64th. So the word size of 64 qubits is equivalent to like all the data stored in the world in the last year in one transaction.

So instead of like linearly going from step A to step B with one instruction, it did such a massive amount of volume and capability, I can solve these problems that, like, one good example is like, if I go into a maze with a conventional computer, I turn right, go left, I do this. If you go in with that quantum surrogate, I can take every path simultaneously all at once. So really, if you boil down quantum computing, it's just the word size is really, really big.

And, um, and it lets us do kind of amazing things with significant amounts of data in an instant. You know, I've never heard it explained that simply eloquently good work. It's really actually a simple concept that they use some fundamental natures than the bit, because it can be one zero anything.

It's, it's not just on and off. It's, and I put 'em together and it's just really a lot of capability. But It's two to the 64th power root To the 60 foot power, which is equal to a Yoda bit of data, which is equal to all the data stored in the world in the last year.

It's a lot of data about Transactions. Crazy. Now you understand why it's so hard to develop.

Now, as hard as it is though, I, I don't want to be, I, I, I think we owe it to the audience, to Tom. We've been making tremendous progress Yeah. In the quantum field, in the quantum, uh, computing field.

Talk to us a little bit about the state of the art today in quantum computing. Yeah. So, so this quantum bit, which is just an atom, right?

Different kinds of atoms for different, for different applications. Um, the, the quantum bit, the, the whole issue is error correction. They're very noisy.

So measuring a quantum bit is really hard. So there's been really significant improvements in the noise of these bits. So to crack, RSA, which is what we're here to talk about, RSA, is the encryption used on most devices.

It's a prime number 20 thou 2048 bits launch. Um, you need about 4,000 quantum bits, but high quality noise reduced bits. So what happened in the past two, three years ago, if you had a million cubits, which you didn't, it would reduce down to, you know, a hundred clean bits.

Now they're improving the error correction to where, you know, you can have one qubit that's error corrected. And, uh, once you have error corrected qubits, which we're racing towards really fast, you mentioned it Yeah. That the power of what you can do is, you know, is unimaginable.

We're gonna have, you know, instead of ai, we're gonna have convolutional neural nets that can parse your whole complex neural nets at once. So instead of like going, well, I'll do this, put something in a bucket, they'll be like, they'll be able, you have about 400 billion neurons in your brain, and it's highly parallel. So with quantum, you could actually understand the whole state of the system.

Error correction is the key. We're making monumental strides in error correction, and it's a really exciting time. Yeah.

The other thing I've heard, and look, I'm no quantum expert, I'll say that up, up front, is we used to say, well, we had to reach a thousand qubits to have sort of a working quantum computer model, but now they're saying, well, no, we may not truly need a thousand qubit machine. We could do these in parallel. Yeah.

And we get away with a lot less to have functional quantum. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

So, um, you know, the, the, the, the holy grail is getting to 4,000 qubits to crack RSA and when that happens, we'll talk about it in a minute, but every device is vulnerable. Your camera, your Plane, anything that's encrypted, Anything that's encrypted is vulnerable. It's kind of like the new malware.

Um, so, um, you know, there, there lies, the, the challenge State of the art RSA is 2048. Yeah. But there's a lot of legacy stuff out there that's 1 0 2 4.

Yeah. And that needs half 4,000. You say you need 4,000 for 2048, you probably need 2000.

Right. And in parallel, you could get almost in spinning distance of that right now, from what I understand. Yeah.

And there's, you know, in large corporations, um, they'll have thousands of applications that have embedded cryptography. Some of this is from companies that have gone outta business. Sure.

Some of it's, you know, des triple des old, old encryption that's already been hacked. So we already have this cryptographic debt is a term I was a CIO in my old des We have this cryptographic debt, and as I said, only about 25% of the companies actually monitor what cryptography they have. So the networks are strewn with older stuff mis implementations, and we don't even know what debt we have.

So it's really, yeah. It's not just cracking RSA, it's, there's just a vast array of stuff out there that we don't even know what it is. You know, RSA might be the gold standard, but there's a lot of silver, bronze, and copper.

Yeah. It's in play here that, that's highly Vulnerable. Um, now look, I've, I've had the pleasure over the years of, of working with a few companies in the quantum encryption field, one of which, or post quantum Yeah.

Encryption, I think is the right term. One of which is DigiCert, which is probably the worldwide, worldwide leader in digital certificates. Web certificates.

Yeah. You know, and of course NIST has been involved in this Yeah. Mire, you know, quasi-governmental agencies and, and we have come out with post quantum algorithm.

Yeah. That is supposedly quantum proof. Yes.

Now, the adoption of the, you, you know how security is, we don't, do we have what we call just in time security. Yes. They don't do it till it's probably a little too late, then they all of a sudden everybody gets religion.

Yeah. But what, what about, what's the state of post quantum cryptography for these kinds of Sure. Digital Certificates?

Um, great question. Just I wanna be really clear that post quantum is just better math. So RSA primer, refactored post quantum is just lattice math.

It's just better math. So I like to equate it with RSA. If I wanted to have tea with the queen, I go to Windsor Castle, there's one guard, I push motor and go FT with the lattice based math or post quantum, it's like every inch of that palace is filled with a guard, so I'm just not gonna get through it.

So I think the term post quantum is a little confusing and deceptive. It's just a better math algorithm that can withstand these quantum attacks because they're just not prone to the large word size in a quantum computer. Sure.

So I think, um, you know, when it comes to post quantum, so we've established, NIST is established basically with crypto. You're starting to see a lot of compliance regimens mandating, um, post quantum, but more important than post quantum. And post quantum is just the next algorithm is this concept of crypto agility.

And that is, you know, now that, uh, we have a new algorithm, what if that fails tomorrow? How do I swap that out? So in the past, you know, these implementations of cryptography have been very static.

You can't change them. But this move to crypto modernization is really about crypto agility. Meaning if I have a million cell phones and I need to swap out the algorithm, I can say I've got a threat.

I can press a button and upgrade to post quantum two, or whatever it might be. Um, so that's the field we are in at q secure is basically crypto agility and orchestrating this new cryptography to any endpoint when the threat occurs and monitoring it and understanding where we're at. And so I'd like to demystify post quantum better math, um, quantum computing, bigger word size, you know, the concepts is pretty straightforward, but how do you swap it out in real time?

That's the question. Yep. So look, I feel like we gave everyone out here a terrific, uh, you know, quick cursory, cursory course on quantum Yeah.

No charge. Um, but let's now turn to Q secure. Sure.

Yeah. So you said you, you started the company was about four or five years ago. Yeah.

Uh, your daughter is now the CEO I'm gonna assume she has a little bit of a background in quantum and computers As well. She does, Yeah. Um, well first let me do proud Papa with you.

Tell us about your daughter, who's the CEO of background. Yeah. So, uh, our, my daughter Rebecca, who's the CEO, she was a Stanford artificial intelligence.

Um, so she focused on AI and kind of went into the quantum field because the promise of AI when you have a quantum capability, right. So just really exciting. Um, she was, uh, Forbes 30 and a 30 in quantum physics and quantum computing.

She's on the World Economic Forum, the board for AI and quantum, and just really has carved out a really cool position for herself. Um, and so she's, you know, and by the way, she's just a phenomenal leader. She's taken over the company and just a visionary and really leading us into kind of this AI driven, quantum crypto, agile world.

And so, Uh, you must be very proud and you should be very proud. Terrific story. Um, so let's talk Q Secure.

What's the mission? What are you guys doing exactly here in quantum and security? Yeah, so, you know, I've had some exits.

My ethos is really to create a safer future for everybody. We're at kind of this pivotal time when, you know, the internet was built with kind of no walls. It was built to trust everyone.

Scientists. Scientists. It was, but so we're going through a transition where, you know, we've got to, we've gotta rebuild it in the image of that, you know, Alan's, Allen, we can guarantee Alan's Allen, we can guarantee, you know, Alan's talking to Dave and, and, um, so we've gotta rethink it.

And so the future should be safe. We should be afforded, it should be a human right, that you're afforded a degree of privacy and control. So income's Q secure.

So what Q Secure does, um, we have an orchestration platform, fancy word for the software that basically orchestrates this cryptography and keys to any point. It can live in the cloud, it can live on a server, it can live in a air gapped environment if you're high security zone. And then it orchestrates this crypto to any endpoint and you can manage it one single pane of grass glass.

And, um, so that's what we do. In essence, we enforce, um, policy and then let you swap out broad slots of your network in real time. Really easy to deploy.

We've done like post quantum 5G, uh, in a couple hours. And, um, so it's a really easy way to set the stage for crypto agile networks. Um, if you're in the networking space, there's a concept of SD wan, which is a network orchestrated.

Sure. Think of us as SD WAN for cryptography, and that we can orchestrate it across the network in real time. All in software.

Really. Yeah. That's fantastic.

Now there are customers that are more, uh, attuned Sure. I think is a good word. Customers that are more attuned to this kind of solution.

Talk to us about Sure. You know, the target customer personas for Q Secure. Great.

Um, yeah, we, we kind of cut our teeth, um, working with the government. Um, there's been a number of executive orders. One just came out a couple weeks ago, mandating post quantum cryptography and the path there that, you know, the deadline when they think there's gonna be a quantum computer that can hack RSA, it's coming in towards us quickly.

It was 2035, it's now 2030. Um, and this journey and closing quick and closing quick. And so, um, it, it's a governmental mandate.

And, um, so there's real, if you're working with DOD or working with the government in that supply chain, it's mandated. Now what we're starting to see by verticals, and this is pharma banking, a lot of telco energy is now, there's a compliance regimen coming out where they're saying you have to deploy crypto agility. Like PCI, which is the credit card standards now has a requirement for crypto agility.

Um, we were working with a banking customer and they had the regulators in and they said, the regulators have never mentioned post quantum. And the last time they were in, they were like, you Know, You gotta be, you've gotta get this done. You, you.

And so they were like, boy, this is really creeping up. So I think what's happened is this certified crypto, all these compliance regimens, Dora Fido, they're all saying you need crypto agility. And now there's kind of a mad rush in the verticals like pharma, energy banking, kinda The usual suspects for this, but for good reason, right?

Yeah. Uh, either mission critical or highly, highly, uh, regulated kinds of industries where you can't afford to have, you know, kind of New York Times headline kind of, uh, incidents happening. Right?

Yeah, Absolutely. I'll tell you something else, just again, my opinion. Yeah.

I think the speed that AI Yeah. Has tsunami, for lack of a better word, the tech industry Yeah. Has made people quantum shy.

If that's it, that's Hey, I said that word first. Quantum shy. Quantum shy.

Well, it, because they, they, if, if AI can come on like that, so can quantum and though the government, you know, it's like secretariat coming around the bend for the Belmont stakes and pulling away from the field, they're saying 2030, it could very well be 2028. It could be. It could be.

And it's not the kind of thing you can turn on. I mean, the, the, there's so much embedded infrastructure that would need to be updated. Upgraded.

Yeah, quantified. That's a good word. Um, you know, that we, we, we do need now is the time to get out ahead.

Right? We could, yeah. Don't, don't let you know, for those people who, you know, AI came on and was almost auto magical, right?

Yeah. Wow. What It is crazy.

It's fun, you know? Unbelievable. Um, yet it, it's not magic for those of us who are into neural nets and, and understand how AI does what it does.

Yeah. Really putting one word in front of the other. Yeah.

It were, it's the same thing with quantum. I think we're seeing inch by inch, step by step, you know, how do you eat an elephant? One spoonful at a time.

Yeah. And we're eating the quantum elephant one spoonful at a time. Yeah.

So I, I, I do think people are starting to now feel the, uh, the, the, the, uh, the weight of it, you know, breathing down our necks a bit. Um, I've always asked friends of mine who are into the quantum field, what's the killer app? Is, is it the cryptography piece of it?

Yeah. But what are some of the other killer apps out there that you think quantum may unlock for us? Yeah, I think, I think at the top of the pyramid for me, um, is like molecular simulation.

Because right now, if, if I wanna simulate a molecule, you know, we don't have the math or the computing capable to do it. So if you think about the future where I can just engineer materials, I can engineer pharma, um, and I like to impute proteins. Um, it, it, it's just fascinating what we're gonna be able to do.

Um, there's quantum sensing, which is really hitting hard. And that's the ability to sense your environment at the atomic level. 'cause when you can kind of come down to the atomic level, it's amazing what you can do.

It's almost subatomic, right? Subatomic. Yeah.

Yeah. And it, it is, it opens, you know, no, no pun intended, but it opens a whole new world, right? It opens A Whole new world of, of, of Another thing on the, on the security side, one of the big threats we face right now is steel.

Now decrypt later, our data's already being harvested. So, um, they're harvesting the encrypted data. And in the past they've been like, if you have encrypted data, we don't care, but we should care because foreign nation states are, are taking our encrypted data.

They're ordering the, what do they call 'em? Hash hash balls or whatever, uh, yeah, I forgot the name for it. There's one foreign nation state that's speculated how, versus 25% of the global encrypted data, when they have enough qubits to crack it, they can crack that data.

And if it's health records, if it's credit card data, if it's banking data, um, that points a little scary. The other big thing about quantum computer is gonna be revolutionary is quantum neural nets. And this concept of being able to understand the state of a neural net instantaneously, it's gonna open up this kind of super intelligence, this gateway to super intelligence NPI and super intelligence.

Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, your, your brain, your neurons function at a very slow speed.

It's like four bits. But if you had a quantum neural net that the capabilities for artificial intelligence, it's really the real, It's your little, a little scary. Yeah.

Let me give you another kind of pulled right at it. Sci-fi out of a Hollywood movie, once you have the ability to create a neural net that exceeds the capacity of our brain. Yeah, Yeah, yeah.

You Know, immortality has been a, a dream. If you look at it, it drives, it drives religion, right? Yeah.

The thought of being able to live forever. We have this whole class of billionaires. It's not about the money for the, I mean, they have more money than their children's, children's, children's children will use.

But immortality is, is, you know, a a it's the holy grail. Is it possible with a neural net to like download someone's mind? Yeah.

So we, I don't know if you've heard of Ray Kurt's wheel. Sure. You know, the singularity.

So right. Google. Um, so this concept of yeah.

Creating, uh, creating a neural net that, you know, when it's a quantum neural net, you know, right now the challenge with AI is it can only resolve the next word in a really sophisticated way. But when you add these quantum capabilities, it can then create things outside of the known knowledge stack. Exactly.

So I'm a, I'm a, I'm a believer in the singularity, which is the nerdy side of me, right. In that they will develop this capability that, um, you know, you can transcend into that. There's a joke about the singularity is that if you don't have a lot of money, you'll have ads in the sky when you're in the singularity.

And Yeah. Well, you'll have to pay for, right? You gotta pay for it one way or the other.

But the other, the interesting thing about the singularity is that, you know, it was usually, Ray said it was 2050. Now it's like supposed to be 20, 29. People are saying, we may already be reaching it somewhere.

We May already be reaching it Somewhere. Last thing. And then we gotta go.

'cause we're way over time. I apologize, but I, I actually like this stuff. Um, marrying AI and quantum, we talked a little bit about it.

It maybe it brings on the singularity, maybe it brings on a GI super intelligence, but you, you marry that along with what we're calling physical AI robotics. Yeah, Yeah, yeah. Super smart machines that have quantum capability and ai.

Yeah. Do we have to be afraid? Wow, that was a, I wasn't expecting that.

Um, obviously that's a big topic right now. There, there's a lot of thought concern, optimism, pessimism around that. Um, you know, I, I, I personally, so my personal belief is that, you know, the trajectory bends towards morality.

Martin Luther King. Right. Um, and, uh, absolutely.

We definitely need to be concerned, um, because uncontrolled, where it leads us is once it exceeds our capacity to understand, then, you know, it just, it's, it's an interesting thing. But I think, I think, you know, our, our ambition is to create a safer future. I think if the ethos we bring to things collectively is that we wanna create a good outcome with this, then we'll bring that ethos to this discussion and create technology that really has a moral arc to it.

And there will be a lot of problems along the way. There. There certainly will, there'll be growing things.

But I, I agree with you. I, I, I believe in the goodness of, of humanity at a core level. And I think we will build in those guardrails.

I love It. I think there's an opportunity to build unimaginably beautiful things. Absolutely.

That's why you're doing it. You know what we didn't mention though? Dave's Q Secure, what's the website?

com. My email is Dave at Q Secure. And feel free to reach out.

It's a really fascinating topic and it is really appreciate this. We're we're planning on doing a, uh, a virtual event on Quantum either later this year, early next year. Virtually.

We're gonna call it Quantum Leap of all things Quantum. But, um, we'd love to have you come talk about, maybe we'll have Rebecca come on too. Yeah, she's really, Really good.

Like she would be, Would love to talk about Quantum. It's a pleasure meeting you. It's great hanging out with you Too.

Secure here on Text Junk tv. Go check 'em out. We're gonna be continuing our Black hat coverage, uh, in a little bit.

So stay tuned. You're watching Text from TV.