Post-quantum cryptography readiness: what security leaders heard at RWPQC and RSA 2024

Where these accounts come from

This explainer draws on two documents. The first is a Cryptography Caffè post by James Howe and David Joseph dated June 3, 2024, and the second is a SandboxAQ press release dated May 1, 2024. The post says SandboxAQ partnered with MITRE to run the workshop, the second Real World PQC Workshop, which was held in March.

Both documents come from the company. What follows are its staff's chosen highlights from the sessions they attended. They are not full records of the events. The sections below follow those themes in the order a security leader would meet them: knowing where cryptography sits, understanding the standards, handling the protocol and primitive work, and paying for the migration.

Discovery, inventories and standards

The workshop summary starts with a basic task for any security team: knowing where cryptography is used. Marc Manzano, General Manager of the Cybersecurity Group, wrote that experts from Germany's BSI and the UK's NCSC stressed awareness among future integrators of the standards and the role of cryptographic discovery in a migration plan.

On the U.S. side, the post says CISA is committed to enforcing the National Security Memorandum that mandates cryptographic inventories, and it notes next steps outlined by Dr. Garfield Jones.

NIST's Dustin Moody, according to the post, updated attendees on the progress of the PQC FIPS and on timelines for further KEM and signature standards.

These three points form a sequence. Awareness comes first, then discovery and inventory, then alignment with the standards as they are finalized. A CISO reading the summary sees the inventory step framed in two ways: as part of a sound migration plan and, for U.S. federal contexts, as a mandated requirement.

Protocols and the primitives gap

Not all of the workshop discussion concerned inventories and timelines. Some speakers covered how post-quantum protocols are built and checked.

Rolfe Schmidt of Signal, the post says, explained how the company's reliance on formal verification ensures security in the protocols it builds. The post describes two tools, one symbolic and one computational, used one after the other in alternation, and says this let Signal find the parts of the protocol that had to change before a security proof was possible.

The post also reports a shared point from talks by Meta, Google and AWS. These companies depend on advanced cryptographic primitives that go beyond signatures and KEMs. The authors call this a significant gap and say post-quantum alternatives still have to be developed for primitives such as password-authenticated key exchange and anonymous credentials.

The issue also came up at RSA Conference. David Joseph, Product Manager in the Cybersecurity Group, presented "Batch Signatures, Revisited," which the post describes as a method to raise throughput and compress digital signatures in order to speed PQC adoption.

Taher El Gamal, a SandboxAQ senior advisor and founding member of its AQ CISO Council, gave a keynote at the PQC Palooza hosted by Thales. According to the post, he said he built the first SSL for encrypted point-to-point communication and did not foresee the device-to-device use it would see 25 years later. His remarks illustrate how a protocol can be put to uses its designers never planned for.

Cost, burnout and modernization budgets

The RSA notes in the post turn from technical problems to organizational ones. They state that CISO burnout is a major problem. Leaders are struggling with budget cuts, more legal threats and pressure to act early on hard problems such as encryption management.

Graham Steel, SandboxAQ's Head of Product in Cybersecurity, sat on a panel with experts from government, GSIs and the private sector. The post says the panel worked from the premise that there is no spare money for PQC transition projects. It discussed tying the work to wider digital modernization efforts and adding cryptography modernization to those initiatives.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the post reports, highlighted the closing NIST PQC standardization process in a 15-minute keynote. The authors read this as a sign of the transition's relevance for diplomats and lawmakers.

Taken together, these accounts describe a migration that competes for attention and money with everything else on a CISO's desk. The panel's answer to that problem was to place it inside existing modernization work rather than run it as a separate project.

How a quantum-security company placed its CISO

The second document shows how one company in this field defined its own security leadership role. SandboxAQ announced on May 1, 2024 that it had appointed Chris Bates as Chief Information Security Officer.

The release says Bates is the company's first CISO. He is responsible for protecting its data, communications and intellectual property, and he is also expected to help develop the AQtive Guard cryptography management platform. According to the release, he came from SentinelOne, where he was Chief Trust and Security Officer.

The role as described faces outward as well as inward. Manzano said in the release that Bates will engage with CISO peers at customers, which he listed as global banks, government agencies and other large enterprises. The blog post frames the hire the same way. It describes Bates's network across the CISO community as a temperature check on the cryptography problems CISOs face.

Points a CISO can take from the record

Read together, the speakers' points fall into three groups. The first is to find and inventory the cryptography an organization uses. The second is to follow the standards work and its timelines. The third is to fund the migration through broader modernization rather than as a standalone project.

The protocol discussions add a fourth point. Signatures and key exchange are only part of the job, because the primitives that large platforms rely on beyond them still lack post-quantum replacements in the authors' account.

The Bates appointment adds a view of the role itself. In a company built around cryptography management, the first CISO's job is described as covering both internal protection and product and customer work.