Navigating Quantum Security with QuSecure’s Rebecca Krauthamer

Hey, everyone. We're back here at the, uh, tech Strong Studios. You know, for those of you who know me, I, I always still get a thrill out of people locally being able to come into studio and do interviews with us.

You know, 98% of what we do is remote, but every once in a while we get someone who actually lives down here in South Florida, and that's the case here. I wanna introduce you to Rebecca Kroener. That Right at t Yeah, Exactly.

Okay. Exactly right. Rebecca Is the, uh, CEO of a company called Q Secure.

That's Q-U-S-E-C-U-R-E. com. Um, I had the pleasure of meeting Rebecca's dad, long story Jewish dad, founder of his daughter.

She's the greatest thing in the world. Wait till you meet her. Um, but all getting aside, I met her dad, Dave, who he is the Chief Commercial officer, chief Revenue Officer, chief, some things Field, CTO, Field, CTO, field CTO.

Um, but he, at one point was the CEO and it first started, or they He was, yeah, we started it together. Yep. And, um, that was at Black Hat in Las Vegas.

Oh. About a month ago now. And that is on Text Drunk tv.

So if you wanna find out more about Q Secure, check out my interview with Rebecca's dad, David. And then, of course, just a couple weeks ago, we had the pleasure of my friend Jennifer Legio is now a, I forget her title with you guys too, but she's basically running, she's Running marketing, marketing and revenue Operations Yeah. And revenue.

Yep. Um, she's also joined, and of course, Jennifer's somewhat, I know for 20 something years, and she's a rock star, so it's quite, quite a, a, a collection. But, you know, I remembered after interviewing your dad, going to the website, Rebecca, and looking at the, like the board of advisors and the people affiliated with Q Secure, and you've, you've collected quite a, a collection of distinguished folks in the, in the, uh, quantum space that are involved here.

So congratulations on Thank You. Thank you. But you know, it starts at the top.

You're the CEO. So why don't we start with this, if you wouldn't mind, give people a sense of how did you wind up being the CEO of a quantum company working with your dad? That's a great question.

Um, well, thank you, Alan. Uh, I work with my dad, but Jen calls you family and Jen's a rock star now. She's part of our family.

So I think we're all, we're all family. Yeah. Now we're all part of the, the big Six degrees of separation in the quantum world.

We are and we aren't, but good. Yes. There go.

There you go. So, uh, yeah, how did I end up working at a quantum security company with my dad? So, long story short, I, I learned so much from him growing up, and, uh, yeah, he was always very entrepreneurial.

So when I was seven years old, I had set up shop outside of my elementary school and was selling little beaded bracelets and things, and Yeah. First, uh, first business, right? Mm-hmm.

But I ended up studying symbolic systems at Stanford, which is kind of this ai, how do you build a thinking thing with a computer? Mm-hmm. And so I was working for a while in actually building AI solutions for companies.

I was the hired gun. And to make the long short, you, when you're an AI practitioner, you get to this point where you are, you wanna achieve all of those sci-fi dreams. You wanna build a perfect model that could predict the stock market or X, Y, Z.

And the reality is that you can't, because there's too many dependencies, too many things you have to take into account that influence, for example, the, the, the price of a stock. And so I hit that point when I was, when I was working in AI and enter quantum computing, enter this idea of not a bigger, better, faster computer, but a computer that can help make some of these problems that are really, really hard to figure out because they're so complex, a lot more simple. So my dad and I have always been, you know, we take vacations and talk about these big ideas.

How can we, how can we, uh, you know, make the world a better place? And quantum became the thing we started talking about. So we started this, this company together that was working on quantum algorithms.

And this was just before COVID. And we, uh, what happened was we got an initial grant from the US Air Force to start looking at, in addition to these quantum algorithms, the flip side, one of the things that quantum computers will be able to do is break the, uh, Traditional, Traditional encryption. That's exactly right.

So within that, I was the CEO of this company that was working on quantum algorithms. He then spun out this company working on the security side, and then pulled me over to be the first VP of engineering. So I was running the product technology side.

Here we are now five years later. And, uh, we've, we've built Q Secure into the, the world's first and leading platform in addressing this migration to quantum safe cybersecurity. And yeah, last October, he, he passed the baton.

I went from running the technology side to running Q Secure. And, and yeah, it's, it's a really exciting time for the company. It's an exciting time for, for me and learning a lot, still learning a lot from my dad.

And it's a, it's a total blessing to, to work with him. I, I can only wish, well, you know, so I'm closer to your dad's age than your age. Obviously your dad and I are about the same age.

Actually, we discussed this, but, um, I will tell you the idea of being able to work with your child and see them kind of fly. Yeah. Is, is every parent's dream?

It's some, well, maybe not every parent, but it certainly makes a parent proud. Um, I want to go back to the AI thing a little bit. 'cause this is something we've discussed.

You know, this studio we're in right here. I do text on gang in every day with a bunch of people. And, and one of the things we've discussed is have we reached maximum ai, or in other words, our ability for our large language modules and just the whole state of it to continue to grow at the pace it's grown.

Because I mean, we've scraped the internet dry. You can talk about synthetic data, you know, and, and Jensen Wang and the, and the, you know, the Nvidia people come out with a new generation of processors twice a year or whatever. But the core kind of problems that we really wanna solve, climate change may be protein folding.

Like really The tough stuff. The real tough stuff. Yeah.

As good as we can get with ai. Do we hit sort of physical limits of, of how much data there is to make the LLM so good of the processing power of the energy to power those processors of the cooling of the bandwidth that, you know, just, I mean, it seems like we're taxing the whole system to the max When technology, it, it doesn't, you've seen, you've seen it, right? We've all seen it.

We, it doesn't grow in a linear way. No. It, it goes like this.

Right? And what we saw with, with LLMs really changing the game for ai, it was one of those hockey stick. It was one of those hockey stick moments.

Yeah. And what you're asking is, are we still on that hockey stick for LLMs or are we not? Right?

Mm-hmm. And I think we're probably somewhere around here. There's, there's probably more that we can do, but when we think about Right, those, those big problems, one of the things that got me so excited about quantum computing is with classical processing, which, which LLMs are ultimately doing at a certain point, you can't take in more variables and combine them in an optimal and timely time efficient way to come up with answers to some of these problems.

Probably like protein folding and, um, and, and global warming. For example, there's one problem that quantum in theory can solve for, for global warming in its, uh, it is called the Haber Bosch problem. And it's some basically this, this process that accounts for two or 3% of, of global emissions, you could, in theory, use a quantum computer to, to solve this equation that, that can minimize that really that challenge, right?

So, and you can't do that on a regular computer, even with some of the most advanced ai, the question of whether we're, we're plateauing is a good one. Fundamentally, you can keep using AI to estimate and approximate and do all these things, but some of these problems are just really, really, really outta reach for mm-hmm. For, uh, for regular computers.

Excellent. We're gonna do a part two of this interview, Becca, where we we're gonna get into sort of what everyone needs to know about Quantum, but I wanna focus this part one though on Q secure. So, look, when I, I first became aware of, let's call it post quantum algorithms, I guess is the term that gets pushed around a lot, uh, talking to some of the digital certificate providers, digis mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Those folks. And they introduced me to some folks at, uh, mire and nist.

Mm-hmm. And you know, and I became aware that, hey, on Q day, and we will get into what Q Day is on the part two, but on the day when con quantum computing becomes real mm-hmm. Not that it's not real now, but it becomes widely available.

All of our RSA encryption and HTML, you know, SSL encryption is toast toast, you know, because what would take the bad guys hundreds of years, a quantum computer will do in minutes, maybe. Mm-hmm. Um, and so this has given rise to this whole, it's really almost post quantum security.

So how do we secure stuff that quantum computer quantum computing renders easily breakable, for lack of a better way? I guess that's a good way of describing it. So talk to us about Q Secure and how it, how it helps us survive.

Q Day. Everything you said is spot on. So the, as data travels over networks S-S-L-T-L-S mm-hmm.

It, it's, it's effectively using one type of, of math problem encryption that is vulnerable to a sufficiently powerful quantum computer. And we're not just worried about when QA comes, we're also worried about the, the data harvesting and stockpiling that's happening very actively right now to, to sit on that data for when it can be decrypted. And some of that will be still be very valuable when it is decrypted, if it's harvested today.

My bank account information, my electronic health records, national security, all these things have harvested today are probably still relevant in the next several years. So the question is how do we, how do we make this better? The, the good news is we know the big bad, we also know the solution.

There's a set of algorithms that are written for regular computers to run. So you don't need a quantum computer to fight a quantum computer set of algorithms that, as of last year missed standardized. And now it is a, it's really just a matter of organizations, private and government adopting these algorithms.

And you pointed to, uh, digital certificate companies. And one of the biggest challenges with adopting these quantum safe algorithms is that it's just very decentralized right now, the way that we've built up mm-hmm. Um, uh, PKI and, and our current infrastructure.

So an organization is sitting there saying, what, what do I do? What do I do to actually take control of this and make sure that I migrate the things that matter to quantum safe algorithms sooner than later? Do I have to rely on my vendors?

Do I have to, you know, how, where do search come in? Where do mm-hmm. So what Key Secure does is, uh, and we started working with, with the government to sort of achieve those, those highest level of, of compliance and, and working with the most sensitive stuff.

And now we work a lot with banks, we work a lot with telecommunications companies. We work a lot with oil and gas, these critical infrastructure companies to actually centralize and take control, not just of, um, certificates and, and the traditional stuff, but actually centralize the management and deployment across your network of these algorithms. And so we, we have a platform that takes stock, discovers all the encryption going across your network, allows that to leave a springboard to migrate to these post quantum cryptographic algorithms.

3 to be ready to adopt post quantum, but it's Right. It's addressing that cryptographic debt and then reporting on it. So making it, um, simpler and faster, and in most cases, a lot more affordable for these organizations to, to, to take on this migration or whatever encryption, migration they're getting their hands on.

So it's the first time I've heard the term cryptographic debt, crypto debt. Well, maybe when they're talking about bitcoins and stuff. But I mean, in, in this, in this meeting, um, you know, I remember thinking last year when these new algorithms came out, wow, we're finally out ahead.

Well, for what? Right. Because it's rare insecurity we're out ahead.

Um, but, but the fact is, listening to you talk, and, and you know what I'm thinking? There are still organizations out here that are running like Windows Me. Yep.

Windows 95, and Yep. Yep. You know, yes.

The smarter people are gonna jump on this. Use a company like Q Secure. 'cause you can't defend what you don't know you have.

Right. So they're going to use Q Secure, they're gonna find out what their exposure is, where their exposure is. Mm-hmm.

And then do what they need to do to quantum proof it. Right. If that's a word, quantum proof it.

Right. Um, but they're gonna be the laggards who are still running Windows 95. Right.

Who refuse to kinda get with the program until, and then they're the first ones who scream bloody murder when they're a victim. Right. Right.

Of a hack or something of Right. It's terrible. Um, that's gotta be part of your mission accused secure, making sure everyone's aware Yeah.

They gotta do this. I mean, and look, in the security world, we self fudge. Right.

Fear, uncertainty and doubt. I'm not saying you should do that. Right.

I, I had friends who used to, you know, they'd go up to the CEO and say, well, the board and say, if you don't do this, you're gonna wind up in prison stripes. Right. Because you gotta, there's real, real important.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. How do you view Q secure's mission and make sure everyone's aware of what they need to do now to get out in front of this train?

Yeah. Again, a great question and one that we think about every day, but I also, look, look, uh, we think two years is a long time. And then two years from now, we'll look back and say, that went so fast.

And one of the first things that we figured out working with our first, our first partner, first customer was the Air Force. We have to meet organizations where they're at and some of 'em, yeah. Windows 95 or Internet Explorer.

Mm-hmm. And so what we built in is, is fundamentally we're not asking any rip and replace. Like a lot of, a lot of past migrations, they'll, people are familiar with this, you gotta go find everything and you gotta rip and replace.

That's not what we're asking this time. Overlay legacy systems all the way to the most modern systems. That's what we, that's one of our sort of big things that we offer to organizations.

Right. We get, we, uh, a big organization just came to us, said, Hey, we've got 2,500 in-house applications. 3.

We know it's a prereq to be quantum ready. Uh, help because we're gonna have to rewrite all this stuff, or we're gonna have to, they were literally quoted close to a hundred million dollars to, to do these migrates, which is absurd. Yeah, yeah.

And many years, right? So that's a perfect use case for us to go and say, well, give us, give us a shot. Um, it'll be much faster, much cheaper.

And you don't have to worry about ripping up out everything that you've invested in. Right. Because yeah, we can, we can try to come up with the perfect solution, but at the end of the day, people have invested millions and millions in their infrastructure, they're not gonna move off it.

So that's, that's one answer, right. We gotta meet people where they're at. The second answer is, there are certain organizations that are gonna prioritize it first and be the leaders.

And that's, that's government, that is finance, that is telecommunications and critical infrastructure. And there are a lot that are gonna fall behind. And one of the forcing functions that's coming up at the end of next year, which sounds to some like a long time, but it's just 15 months away.

Mm-hmm. There can be no new acquisitions into national security in the US that do not support post quantum cryptography in 15 months. Really?

Yeah. 0 now mandated by the end of 2026, organizations that plan to sell new technology, international security, have to support post quantum. So that's gonna be a, a wake up call for a lot of people.

Yeah. Well, that, that'll also be the, the beacon. Right?

Right. If you're not with it, you're out. Um, of course, if they don't postpone it or delay it, or as sometimes happens with these things.

Mm-hmm. Um, so a lot of this is US based, but you know, we see in security the EU seems, the EU seems to have more of a political will to get things like this done mm-hmm. Than we do here.

What about any post quantum requirements or post to be clear, post quantum cryptography requirements coming outta the eu? There are, so earlier this year, March and April, we saw across the world a lot of government level timelines being introduced. And so the EU released theirs.

The UK released theirs, Australia released theirs as well. And it's these, these staged migrations for usually starting with government when everything has to be first, when new acquisitions have to be compliant, second when everything that they own has to be compliant. And then, you know, filtering down to, to highly regulated industries and so on and so forth.

Australia, for example, has come out and said, Hey, everything has to be post quantum by 23. Wow. You got five years go.

Um, so it's, it's, uh, generally what we're seeing is by 2030, at least, the most high sensitivity systems have to be migrated. And that's not just the us that is around the world. Around the world, around the world.

And a lot of, a lot of, or, or a lot of countries are following nist, the NIST standards, the US NIST standards in adopting those. Hmm. Interesting.

Yeah. Um, you know, we, we look at, I wanna come back to you and your background here. How does ai, 'cause a lot of people think AI and quantum together Oh boy.

Trouble squared. Yes. Right.

Um, but how is, how is AI helping us in this post quantum crypto kind of scenarios? Well, there's, there's the flip side. So what we talk about is we've, the last several decades we've seen one encryption migration after another.

It's because encryption is not meant to last forever. Mm-hmm. It's a cat and mouse game like any other part of security.

So the, on the threat side, we talk about the, the, the post quantum cryptography, migration as a catalyst for changing how we manage encryption, that centralization of control, putting control into an organization's hands, not just because of quantum, but not just because of quantum. It's whatever comes next. And whether it's AI getting more intelligent in its threats to, to encryption, whether it's quantum, we find new quantum algorithms after this one, that's also a threat.

You need to be much more agile in how you manage encryption, because we can't take three to seven years to migrate. Every time something gets broken, you need to be able to push a button and fix it. So we need to get, just as agile as AI is, is becoming.

So I guess the answer is it's forcing us to be more intelligent on, on the defense side for one thing, uh, which is good, which is overall good from a, how is it helping in the defense? There's a whole world of, of capabilities, right? We look at using AI for understanding how, uh, different inventories you end up with all, sometimes all these spreadsheets of here's where my crypto lives.

And so making sense of that data for automating migration is, is a really interesting field. And then also identifying these threats and giving policy recommendations for how you, how you update and you manage your encryption is, is another interesting one. Absolutely.

You know, we we're running a little low on time, but I had something, one other topic I wanted to hit. You mentioned earlier about, you know, the bad guys and say hello to the bad guys, right? Whatever flavor of bad guy you're looking at today.

But they're all sort of tall balling, right? Stolen payloads that are hashed or encrypted waiting for the day when they can turn the quantum beast, the quantum dogs loose on them to un unencrypted, whether it's your bank account information, health records, national security, what have you. Mm-hmm.

Uh, I wanna make sure people realize that what a big issue this is now, it's funny, it's almost like a radioactive decay. The longer though you're holding that information, the over time the more it decays and becomes useless or less, less valuable. Um, but what, and is there anything we could do around that?

I mean, kind of the horses outta the barn already, but Yeah, I, I, radioactive decay is a, is a good way to look at it. I saw a talk by the now former CTO of the ccia A and he, he looked at everybody in the audience and he said at some point when QA comes, everybody here is gonna have their own WikiLeaks moment. And it's worth thinking about that, whether you run a business or you use any kind of digital communication.

I have a post quantum enabled VPN on my phone. Really? Yeah, I do.

Uh, 'cause I think about that. I think about my data, well being, Being the CEO of qq. I would, if anyone was gonna have it back around, I would expect it to be You.

Right. Right, right. And we, we eat our own dog food.

We use our protections internally as well. And so, uh, the one thing too I wanna make sure to get across is a lot of, there's so much jargon in this, and boards, boards know at this point generally that this is something they have to address. But it's one where you can get caught up in, well, what do I do?

I'm gonna bring in some different partners and, and vendors and think about this and maybe spend a couple years on strategy and a couple million dollars here and there to figure it out. And it's not that complicated. No.

It's really not. And I, I almost think about it like the, the bad guy, the bad actor wants organizations to get stuck in the, in the spin cycle rather than fix fix it up. Right.

So, yeah. That's, that's my kind of word to, the word to everybody is don't over complicate it. Hey, I just wanna double check.

So as part of the product line, you get, you offer a quantum proof, uh, VPN or that's a commercial offering? That's A commercial offer. We, we offer an enterprise VPN.

Really? Mm-hmm. That's quantum proof.

That's quantum proof. Yeah. Very cool.

Yeah. Already out there. Alright.

com. Go check it out. You can ask Rebecca or anything.

I think that Dave gave his contact on his video and we'll link to that video in the notes here. Um, but, but go check out Q Secure. We're gonna come back.

This is gonna be a part two here. It's every man's quantum. So if you're not sure what quantum is and what, or you think you know, but you're not sure, stay tuned for part two.