Hybrid event

Wednesday 13 October 2021, 4pm-6pm (BST)

A joint event between the University of Surrey’s Centre for Cyber Security and the SASIG, the UK’s premier cyber security network.

This is the latest event in Surrey’s ‘Future of Cyber’ series, organised by Surrey’s Centre for Cyber Security (SCCS).

With several major companies promising workable quantum computers by the end of the decade, coupled with techniques such as Shor’s Algorithm which promises to break certain encryption and digital signature schemes with the use of quantum computers, there is rapidly growing interest in understanding the future vulnerabilities of current asymmetric cryptographic techniques.

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) started a process in 2015 to identify algorithms and schemes that would be secure against quantum-enabled attacks. With the 3^rd and hopefully final post-quantum computing selection conference having taken place in June, and a promise to select the final candidates by the end of 2021, we will be asking our expert panel to explain their latest thinking and to explore potential impact on existing computing systems, including problems like retrospective cracking of stored data, including security, medical and financial records.

With our audience’s help, we aim to explore wider aspects, such as digital divides between those countries that have quantum computers and those that do not, and what that means for cyber security on a global stage. We will also look at whether further advances in mathematics are likely to reveal new vulnerabilities in the algorithms that currently keep our data secure.