Industry committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good afternoon, everyone. Is it better if I speak in English?

Industry committee  Perfect. My name is Gilles Brassard. I am a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at Université de Montréal. Let me speak in English and give my credentials, so that you know about me a little bit. I was involved in quantum information, inform

Industry committee  “Harvest now and encrypt later” means there's no protection on the Internet that prevents all the data packets that go around everywhere around in the world from being intercepted. They can continue on their way, so it's not noticeable, but you can take them and store them. That'

Industry committee  “When” is a very difficult question. There are so many technological challenges before this can be achieved. I'm a theoretician, so I'm not the right person to ask. However, there are some people who are more knowledgeable than me, like Michele Mosca—who, by the way, should have

Industry committee  They're probably not.

Industry committee  There needs to be education. There is no magic bullet. People are not sufficiently aware of the threat, and when they are told, they might panic. It's like global climate change. I know that time is limited, but trying to fix the issue will cost money but nothing near as much a

Industry committee  It depends what cryptographic system they are actually using. If they are depending on the systems that were developed in the eighties perhaps, then it is very much a threat. If they're using something else that they're not telling us about, then perhaps national security people

Industry committee  I think there should be a culture of not encouraging banks, enterprises or what have you that do not migrate to quantum-safe technologies. If they don't want to make the effort, then they should not be trusted and people should not do business with them. If there is a consensus o

Industry committee  In the financial sector if there is a leak of confidential data, that's a serious threat, of course; I should have said that. However, if you can decrypt it later, it's not entirely bad, because sometimes if you can decrypt in 10 years something that came out today, maybe it's n

Industry committee  In my view, quantum cryptography will definitely be the first application. It's not for the future, because it's already functional. As I said, China is taking it very seriously. So it's a real application that's already functional for protecting information. With respect to qua

Industry committee  I would say that the most important thing is to let researchers expand their imaginations, because that's what makes real progress possible. As the physicist Einstein said: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” The more you tell people what to do, the less progress y

Industry committee  It depends on what you want to do. You may want to either develop a quantum computer or you may want to develop a quantum Internet, which another speaker mentioned. A quantum Internet would connect all countries, even the whole Earth, to be linked by a quantum network in the same

Industry committee  First, there is a small misinterpretation because quantum cryptography does not in any way serve to break the cryptographic mechanisms currently in use. Quantum cryptography provides an alternative, which is unquestionably secure, as has been demonstrated. That said, conventiona

Industry committee  As I said, we can't know. It's really a guessing game. The fear is that it will be built within 10 years. It's not guaranteed, but there's a good chance it will be, and 10 years from now is tomorrow.

Industry committee  Since I'm a theoretician, I'm very comfortable with your question. The short answer is that what I talked about at length, this “harvest now and decrypt later” strategy, is not a threat to ransomware, because to do ransomware, you need to do it today. It is not as if, in 10 year