ACM PQQS 2026

This week I had the chance to attend and present at ACM’s post quamtum and quantum security conference in Silicon Valley. I’d spent the last year and a bit working on my second quantum cryptography publication titled “Multi-client Verifiable Blind Delegated Quantum Computing,” which is quite a mouthful. I enjoyed working on this project as much, if not more than my earlier quantum Byzantine agreement paper however this definitely took more work. This was a lesson in stumbling around an unfamiliar field, slowly uncovering what has been done before and where we could make a contribution. In hindsight, I wish I had taken more time with my literature review at the beginning to get a clearer picture of the research frontier. I am grateful to have learned a tremendous amount throughout the process and the opportunity to present at an ACM conference was a great reward. My slides and the full paper are available on my site if you’re curious!

I had the honour (and challenge) of presenting immediately after Dr. Charlie Bennett (of BB84 fame). It was a tough act to follow, complete with metaphors about hippies and LSD for the monogamy of entanglement, but I managed to keep most of the crowd engaged. Dr. Bennett’s presentation was titled, “the slippery slope of privacy” and explored the history and defining features of quantum mechanics, with the wave function simply existing in a space spanned by a basis of size equal to the number of distinguishable states, and the contrast between device independent and trusted measurement quantum protocols. Some thoughts that stuck with me included his description of a classical channel as just a quantum channel with the environment as an eavesdropper, the back of the envelope calculation of the temperature dependent information leakage of the Earth illustrating just how unprivate the classical world really is, and just how challenging adversarially prepared hardware can be.

The other presentation I found most engaging was Dr. Renato Renner’s work on randomness. “Without randomness there is no security” rang through clearly in defiance of Einstein’s presuppositions, but randomnness is also not a given. I knew of randomness amplification and extraction but I didn’t fully understand how they worked and how they are measured so I had plenty to learn throughout the hour. It is truly difficult to certify a lack of correlation, given just how many different correlated subsets could be present in any system. The No go result that was presented perfectly captured intuition into a precise statement, no deterministic function can improve randomness. Of course, quantum mechanics, specifically entanglement, can actually come to the rescue here! I suspect that this is not accidental and in some way randomness is necessary at a deeper level for our physical universe. It simply comes to the rescue too often.

Much of the rest of the conference focused on the broader impacts of breaking cryptography. I was naievely under the impression that the transition to post-quantum cryptography just requires switching algorithms. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Google’s Ryan Babbush made clear that the implications for a successful attack on ECC includes:

• Power transport layer security (TLS) underpinning HTTPS
• Hardware Root of Trust immutable boot loaders use ECC to authenticate updates
• Industrial controllers for infrastructure
• Starlink and other satellites
• Cryptocurrencies + planned tokenize NY stock exchange
• More than 200 billion USD abandoned crypto assets Additionally, perhaps hinted at by their zero knowledge white paper earlier this year, the public should expect less and less transparency going forward when it comes to the advancing ECC attacks. In a show of hands at the conference only about 40% raised their hand saying Qday would come before 2030, I was one of those, and I suspect the task to transition is monumental and slow and plenty of organisations will be caught flat footed even if it is only after 2030.

All in all, it was a good few days to cap off a long year of work. I feel motivated to start some new projects that I’ve been putting off for a while.