Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
All righty then.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcomeback to another episode of
Privacy.
Please, Cameron Ivey, here withGabe Gumbs, we're just hanging
out chatting.
Got some pretty cool things totalk about today, but before we
get into that, Gabe, how youdoing man?
Speaker 2 (00:16):
My friend, how are
you?
How are you?
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Doing well, doing
well.
Life moves on.
Yeah can't complain.
It's getting hotter here inFlorida while people have
snowstorms, so I don't knowwhether to be Well, actually
it's getting a little colderagain randomly this week, so I
guess I'll take it.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
I agree.
I agree, as the weather goes,I'll settle for slightly chilly,
and you know, above 70, butbelow 80.
Yeah, no one wants to hear uscomplain about our warm weather.
No, no, sorry, we don't want tobe that podcast, anyways,
especially when they're freezing.
But I hear it's raining quantumcomputers out, it is.
(00:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
We've talked about
this many, many times on the
podcast over the years.
You specifically, and that'sour topic today.
So if anybody hasn't seen yet,about Microsoft, yeah, they had
a big one chip announcement, solet's kind of dig into
thatadella he announced earliertoday in fact that Microsoft was
(01:27):
able to prototype a new quantumprocessing chip using a
topological core called MajoranaM-A-J-O-R-A-N-A.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Majorana Majorana.
Speaker 1 (01:39):
Majorana.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Yeah, I think, is how
that's properly pronounced, and
so we have talked about this onthe show before right.
Like we cover security andprivacy and quantum, the
development of quantum computingis going to affect both quite
significantly, Quitesignificantly.
On the privacy and securityside, as we've always talked
about, one cannot have securitywithout privacy.
(02:00):
So once we have stable quantumcomputing, we will be able to
break existing ethicalencryption.
So you know, think RSA, ECC,Diffie-Hellman, right, Like
those are going to posesignificant threats to banking
communications, governmentcommunications, VPNs as we know
(02:20):
them, SSL, TLS, All of theinternet security just
foundational basics are at riskand they're at risk of attacks
like Harvest Now, Decrypt Later.
So suck up all of the sensitivedata you can today that is
encrypted and decrypt it later.
It's possible that quantumcomputing could also compromise
(02:40):
blockchain and cryptocurrencysecurity, which today enjoys a
lot of relatively, I'd say itenjoys at least a perception of
a lot of securitycryptocurrencies and blockchain.
But just imagine all of thethings you know about crypto
today and how volatile it is andthe problems with it, and then
you wake up tomorrow andsomeone's able to reverse
(03:01):
engineer private keys, allowinga hacker to steal cryptocurrency
or to forge a transaction.
That's just ridiculous.
Imagine an AI-powered cyberattack right With quantum speed.
So the ability to password,crack and brute force attacks
with that kind of quantum speed.
The list of threats is fairlysignificant when we get to
(03:27):
stable quantum computing.
I do want to just say right offthe bat that this announcement
certainly is met with a bit ofskepticism in the professional
community.
I am no physicist, certainly noquantum physicist, but no type
of physicist whatsoever,Although looking at the
responses from around thephysics community, you know a
(03:47):
lot of people are slightlygrumpy, that, like you know,
look, this looks like a lot ofhype and marketing.
They're not wrong, but I thinkthey're missing the point, the
point.
I think the number one takeawayfrom this announcement is it
certainly seems to me that it'sa safe assumption that we are
not decades plural away fromstable quantum computing.
(04:07):
We're not decades.
This kind of breakthroughreally suggests that we are
years away.
Maybe it's 10 years, but it'snot 20.
It's not 20.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
I mean, for the
longest time it's been what 2030
was the estimate?
Speaker 2 (04:20):
Yeah, we've heard
that number thrown around for
like 20 or 30 years.
For those, that's fair.
Okay, so we are coming up onthat timeframe.
But, like in the last fiveyears, like five years ago there
were people probably stillsaying we were 20 years out, and
I think some of those folksweren't really accounting for
just how fast we would have beenable to make this type of
progress.
(04:40):
But here we are.
That type of progress has beenmade.
To break this down in the termsfor those not fully tracking
what in the devil any of thisquantum computing stuff means is
think about at the core howcomputer chips operate on ones
and zeros today, right, like,just all of those bits represent
all those little electricalpulses, represent either a state
of a zero or one and combined,you know, we create machine code
(05:02):
from that and on top of thatmachine code we have computer
code, et cetera, et cetera.
Well, quantum computers, qubitsquantum bits, as opposed to
regular computing bits, have theability to be both a zero and a
one at the same time.
That's what gives them theability to perform so many
computations.
The problem has been creating aquantum chip that is stable,
(05:23):
right, so it's able tocontinuously run, and that
doesn't have a bunch of errors.
What Microsoft has proven at asmall scale is that they can
create a quantum chip that isrelatively stable and doesn't
seem to have a lot of errors.
The next step in developingthis is making that actually
happen at computing scale likeactually making that happen at
(05:43):
computing scale.
So that's a significant hurdleto overcome.
The next hurdle to overcome isin getting whatever chip we
create as humans to interactwith classical computing right,
like the OG zeros, and onecomputing right, like having
that hybrid infrastructure andhybrid computing of the two.
I think that last step willactually be easier than the
(06:04):
first of making it stable.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
But are we talking
about the topo conductors and
quibbets?
Yes, yes, we are.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
The topo conductor is
the infrastructure with which
those qubits are running.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
And so just play with
me here the particles to create
.
Obviously, the long game is tocreate them to be more reliable
and scalable.
Qubits.
Yes kind of like.
That's probably more of the.
This is kind of a breakthrough,because they've found something
(06:40):
that's potentially able to dothat at a certain point.
Right, right, but it's stillnot.
It's still kind of questionable, right?
It's still not it isquestionable.
Speaker 2 (06:50):
Two more things that
are notable here.
I think too, though, in termsof it's.
For those that are kind ofhand-waving, this away is just,
like you know, marketing FUD.
Microsoft is working incollaboration with DARPA on this
.
Darpa, the Defense AdvancedResearch Projects Agency the one
and very same agency thatcreated what we created the
seeds for what we call theinternet today.
(07:11):
Right Like the one and samevery agency, which is to say
Some of the world's smartestpeople are certainly on this
problem.
I know it's a hard problem, butsuggesting that it is that far
away at this point, I think, isnot wise.
The second is Microsoft used amethod that first theorized, so
(07:32):
it's not like the communityhasn't been thinking about ways
to do this for decades.
We are coming up on what's that?
(07:52):
85 plus years since that firsttheoretical presumption that we
could use these types ofparticles.
That's almost a century.
It's really kind of foolhardyto say after a century.
Looking at this, yeah, we'restill another century away.
That might be true for someproblems like time travel, which
might be impossible ever.
But who knows, maybe quantumcomputing opens up time travel.
(08:14):
We don't know the answer tothat kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
Well, okay, that
takes me to commercial
applications.
What does this mean, gabe, whenyou see something like this?
What does it mean for thepotential of quantum computing
when it comes to, like I'mseeing self-healing materials,
breaking down plastics andadvancements in healthcare?
Is that something that comes toyour mind first, or what do you
(08:37):
think?
What is your process on that?
Speaker 2 (08:40):
I mean, my brain
doesn't personally go right to
things like breaking downplastics, probably because I
just don't think about it thatway.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
But I understand.
What does that mean, though?
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Yeah, I think I
understand that, though right,
breaking down plastics is verymuch a it's a chemistry problem,
and so today we run lots oflarge models trying to figure
out chemical interactions.
The pharma world does this quitea bit right, like we're always
trying to discover new drugs,and the way that happens is by
(09:09):
taking large computing modelsand feeding them these different
ways that they interact andtrying to figure out how they
affect different molecules, etcetera, different proteins and
so on and so forth.
Quantum computing gives us theability to do that a thousand
times faster.
Warp speed, warp speed, yeah,and a thousand is probably not
even the right measure, but yeah, exactly.
So it took us decades to figureout what chemical compounds we
(09:30):
needed to break down a plastic,even unsafely.
We could probably get to thatsafer now, much quicker, and so
what you're really pressing onis this type of computing can
help us solve all kinds ofproblems.
If you were trying to put themin big categories of buckets,
anything that took computationalkind of assessment, right.
Like we have to compare lots ofresults, like we have to keep
(09:53):
trying and iterating on, likeall right, how about this, how
about that one, how about?
Speaker 1 (09:57):
this one.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
Any of those types of
functions will now be on
absolute steroids.
I mean, we're talking 1990sbaseball levels of steroids.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
Sammy Sosa, we're
talking.
Sosa levels of steroids oh mygosh, those were such fun times,
those were the days those werethe days.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
Home run derby Mark
McGuire McGuire levels of
steroids.
Speaker 1 (10:19):
Yes, home Run Derby,
mark McGuire, mcguire, levels of
steroids.
Yes, gosh, barry Bonds.
Everybody, even anyone thatlikes sports, that didn't even
like baseball, still enjoyedthose times.
Yeah, bring it back, why not?
Speaker 2 (10:28):
It makes it more fun
Continuing that analogy.
It's not like these gentlemenwere not ridiculous power
hitters to begin with.
Right, right, you take someonelike a Barry Bonds, barry.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Bonds to begin with
right, right, like.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
You take someone like
a barry bonds, like a sandy
sosa who's already smackingballs out of the the the park
and you give them juice, andlike the analogy is the same
right like right.
Yeah, you take these incrediblybrilliant models and you throw
more force power at the models.
Speaker 1 (10:54):
Okay, that's a good
analogy.
Yeah, could you imagine if theydid that if king griffey jr had
taken steroids?
He was, I mean, he had massivelegs, I mean that's that's where
good analogy.
Yeah, could you imagine if theydid that if Ken Griffey Jr had
taken steroids?
I mean, he had massive legs, Imean that's where a lot of his
power Junior and senior.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
If those boys were
juiced up, forget about it.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
I remember that home
run derby with Ken Griffey Jr
where he annihilated balls overa light stirrer.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
He was juiced up.
He could have played center,left and right field alone.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
So, yeah, this is
incredible, gabe, I know we're
kind of coming up on time here,but because we could talk about
this and maybe we'll bringsomebody on, that's maybe a
little bit got more backgroundon this on the physics side,
that'd be interesting.
Yeah, so what we did?
Speaker 2 (11:39):
was.
We reached out to a couple ofactual quantum physicists.
See if we can get them on theshow.
Yeah, quantum physicists see ifwe can get them on the show.
We've talked about this withother security professionals and
amongst ourselves for a while,and although I have a passing
knowledge of it air quotes,asterisk on passing, and many of
our guests had more than apassing I really want to, as
(12:00):
we're getting this close toreality.
I want to hear from an actualquantum physicist of like tell
me what the threat really lookslike.
But for those of us living inprivacy and security space,
here's the takeaway You've gotto be planning for that
inevitability right now.
If you're a CISO, if you'rechief data officer, you already
make plans on a three to fiveyear horizon.
As it is, your three to fiveyear horizon should at least
(12:23):
have the early stages of a plan.
If it doesn't, that'sproblematic.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Yeah, well, we'll
take away from that and again,
hopefully we'll have somebodythat can come on the show and
we'll talk a little bit deeperabout this, because I have a lot
of questions Me too.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
This is super
interesting.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
Hope you guys enjoyed
it and if you have questions,
send them our way.
Anything, and we appreciate youbeing along for the ride.
We'll see you guys next week.
See you.