Root Causes: A PKI and Security Podcast

Root Causes: A PKI and Security Podcast

Digital certificate industry veterans Tim Callan and Jason Soroko explore the issues surrounding digital identity, PKI, and cryptographic connections in today's dynamic and evolving computing world. Best practices in digital certificates are continually under pressure from technology trends, new laws and regulations, cryptographic advances, and the evolution of our computing architectures to be more virtual, agile, ubiquitous, and cloud-based. Jason and Tim (and the occasional guest subject matter expert) will help you stay current on developments in this essential technology platform and to understand the whys and wherefores of popular Public Key Infrastructures.

Episodes

Root Causes 571: Will There Ever Be a Cryptographically Relevant Quantum Computer?

January 22, 2026 • 9 mins
We discuss the idea that it might be impossible to actually create a cryptographically relevant quantum computer and weigh in on this idea.
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Root Causes 570: PQC Readiness at the Boardroom Level

January 20, 2026 • 12 mins
Repeat guest Chris McGrath shares what enterprises need to be doing now to stay on track for the NIST PQC deadline in 2030.
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Root Causes 569: New Regulations Are Changing the PKI Landscape

January 18, 2026 • 9 mins
Repeat guest Chris McGrath joins us to discuss how increasingly strict regulations are requiring increased rigor, visibility, and auditability for enterprise digital certificates and PKI.
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Root Causes 568: Upping Your Certificate Game for Better Security

January 15, 2026 • 12 mins
Senior cyber security advisor Chris McGrath joins us to discuss redefining digital certificates and their role in your organizational security profile, increasing regulation of certificates, and how enterprises can up their certificate game.
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Root Causes 567: Top 10 PQC Laggards in the Enterprise

January 13, 2026 • 20 mins
We name the ten enterprise environments and use cases that are most likely to be late adopters of post quantum cryptography (PQC).
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Root Causes 566: Time Is a Security Primitive

January 11, 2026 • 12 mins
We discuss the foundational importance of time in PKI and security in general. This includes when things happen, the order in which things happen, and attacks based on time-spoofing. We drill down on certificates, roots, timestamping, Certificate Transparency, patching, audits, and PQC.
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Root Causes 565: Our Response to QWAC Arguments - Part 3

January 7, 2026 • 11 mins
In our concluding episode on the topic, we scrutinize arguments made for and against QWACs, this time focused on "compliance and interoperability."
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Root Causes 563: Our Response to QWAC Arguments - Part 1

January 5, 2026 • 15 mins
As a follow up to our episode 546, we break down the first of three sets of arguments about QWACs and examine their level of validity.
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Root Causes 564: Our Response to QWAC Arguments - Part 2

January 4, 2026 • 11 mins
In our second of three episodes on the topic, we scrutinize arguments made for and against QWACs, this time focused on "governance and sovereignty."
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Root Causes 562 : What Is a Side Oracle Attack?

December 29, 2025 • 7 mins
You may have heard of side channel attacks. Now Jason explains what a side oracle attack is and how a side oracle attack in conjunction with AI could be effective against the HQC or Falcon PQC algorithms.
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Root Causes 561: What Is Classic McEliece?

December 22, 2025 • 7 mins
One of the NIST Round 3 PQC finalists that was never selected or eliminated is Classic McEliece. In this episode we explain in non-math terms how this algorithm works.
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Root Causes 560: AI in 1000 Days - Small Language Models

December 17, 2025 • 10 mins
Continuing our examination of AI in 1000 days, we discuss the use of finely tuned small language models for highly specific use cases.
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Root Causes 559: AI in 1000 days - Content Quality

December 15, 2025 • 12 mins
We discuss what happens when the quality gap between AI-generated and human-generated content drops to zero. We explore the consequences of this inevitable outcome.
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Root Causes 558: AI in 1000 days - Human-in-the-loop Economy

December 14, 2025 • 7 mins
In our ongoing series on what AI will look like in 1000 days, we discuss the spread of a new business process, where AIs do the bulk of the work while humans sit in the loop for certain specific tasks and roles.
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Root Causes 557: Top 5 PQC Laggards

December 11, 2025 • 9 mins
Following up on our list of top 5 PQC vanguards, in this episode we detail the top 5 PQC laggards.
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Root Causes 556: Top 5 PQC Vanguards

December 9, 2025 • 9 mins
We describe the top five technology categories that are on the vanguard of driving PQC adoption. We describe what these categories have in common and how that results in early adoption of post quantum cryptography.
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Root Causes 555: Perpretrators of Rogue Certificates

December 7, 2025 • 12 mins
We detail the top ten groups inside the organization who introduce rogue certificates into IT organizations.
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Root Causes 554: Disentangling Quantum

December 4, 2025 • 10 mins
Tech watchers tend to conflate the many quantum technologies under development right now. In this episode we go through these technologies and explain how they connect.
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Root Causes 553: Connecting Quantum Clocks to Cryptography

December 2, 2025 • 5 mins
We discuss quantum clocks and their potential role in cryptography.
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Root Causes 552: 2026 Predictions

November 30, 2025 • 32 mins
We share our PKI predictions for 2026. Topics include PQC, eIDAS 2, CT logging, ACME, passkeys, CA distrust, AI model poisoning, and new attack vectors.
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