Quantum & Post-Quantum Cryptography | Boston Blockchain Week 2026

Good afternoon everybody. I'm Scott Dogget. Um like you said, I'm from the National Academy of Leadership Development. Uh we focus on helping leaders and organizations create healthy workplace cultures through servant leadership. Uh which you're thinking, why is this guy up here talking about quantum and postquantum cryptography and I was kind of thinking the same thing on the way here.

Uh but good news is I'm just here to serve as your moderator. I'm really excited to introduce our panel. Our conversation today is really going to be focused on our digital locks uh that today are protecting our data, our identity, our assets and really looking at can we trust them in the future where quantum computers are going to be powerful enough to potentially break some of them and what we can be doing today to be responsibly preparing without letting fear and misinformation guide us and and influence our decisions. So, um, on our panel today, we've got, uh, next to me is, uh, Mera Blanki. She is the, and excuse me, I got to wear my readers here.

The principal software engineer and cryptographer at Circle, uh, where she works on the brand new arc just came out this week.

Well, next week,

next week, coming out next week. Uh, and also responsible for the Circle Quantum Road. Uh, next to me is Max Corchain Mackey, the director of security engineering at Figment. Uh he's got over a decade of experience in offensive security, red teaming, threat modeling, and secure key and wallet management. And last but not least, uh we've got Yuna who's the founder of Bolt Technologies where he develops crypto agile quantum resistant protection for the digital assets at the wallet and transaction levels.

So uh panel, it's great to have you here. I want to start talking about uh what is genuinely at risk and what is maybe a little bit exaggerated or or hype like the last panel uh finished off talking about. So uh Mirror, I'll start with you. So when they say that quantum computers can break blockchain, what is actually vulnerable? What is going to continue to be secure?

And then what is maybe a little bit more exaggerated?

Right. Well, thank you. Um so before we go into that I want to make clear that the quantum threat is real. You could now actually rent quantum computers on Amazon bracket. Uh so they're not powerful enough to break cryptography yet but they will eventually break uh classical RSA as well as digital signatures.

Now when people say that quantum will break blockchain they're looking at the most visible tip of the surface which is the transaction signatures that we use to sign transactions. that will definitely be broken. Now, the good news is we actually have the tools to fix digital signatures and or upgrade, I would say, and and encryption. And so, when we're talking about, you know, blockchain, we're not really talking about quantum blockchains being broken. We're talking about a full stack infrastructure upgrade which includes the blockchain, the consensus layer, the communication layer, the the wallets, the payment infrastructure, the cloud infrastructure.

Uh and what's remaining secure is every single system which is being upgraded.

Great. So, Max, uh, from an attacker's perspective, are there quantum related risks that exist today that we should be concerned about, or are there are just some bad actors out there that are trying to prey on our kind of our uh paranoia?

Yeah. So, the answer to that is is boring, but it's it's it's more tangible, right? So, um there there's a lot of fear, there's a lot of misunderstanding around what quantum is, how much should I care about it, what can I do? Um and a lot of the rhetoric um is sort of a sky is falling rhetoric, right? Uh this is like a great attack surface for thread actors, right?

Whenever you have something that's based in fear, you can get someone to act um you know, impulsively and sort of like, you know, forget all the stuff that they've learned in security for the past 20 years. Um and it's not a theoretical attack, right? We've seen it happen like a few months ago. There's a whole bunch of reporting of like a coordinated quantum based like fishing uh you know lure attack somewhat targeted um where quantum was the hook right like the fear was hey your wallet is not quantum safe you got to do this thing scan this QR code whatever give me your seed phrase um but it worked right um so the these are real things these are are real attacks um prior to having a like an actual computer that that can break the crypto and and Yun. So, if I get a product that that claims to be quantum proof, should I just take that at face value or should I be skeptical?

And what are some some things that I could be looking for to make sure that this is maybe not a product that's not been tested or one of these kind of these fearbased solutions?

Well, you you have to be careful about advertisements and marketing. There's um if you use symmetric cryptography such as AES at the 256-bit level that is quantum safe still right so there's a lot of companies out there they use symmetric and go quantum safe there's nothing new [laughter] so um when they say quantum safe just get somebody who's knowledgeable to you know find out for you whether they are using a standard uh one of these standards that that are approved by the standards agencies like NIST and the The only reason I say that is because when you have a standard um there's a lot of visibility. So there's a lot of eyes on it, a lot of attacks on it, um a lot of analysis. Now, if you don't use a standard and you do a DIY crypto, what happens is that you're on your own, right? No one's going to tell you if it's breakable.

And if somebody does break it and it's an adversary, they're not going to tell you. they're going to just be in your system for a while and take everything when they want to, right? So, you know, those are the decisions that you have to make if you say somebody says it's quantum safe and you know, deal with it. Um, and then and then the ability to change and we can go into that later when when you get to it. Yeah,

I love that. Okay, so let's talk about how urgent of a risk this is and who owns readiness. Uh Max, you know, the responsibility for cryptography really spans across a lot of different entities between blockchains and vendors and um you know, business uh individual businesses. And so where does readiness kind of fall and what might fall through the cracks? I'm going to start by saying that like I think quantum is a difficult topic for the security industry to communicate um accurately on uh largely because we're used to kind of like being able to point to a spectre and like largely say the shape of that spectre and then talk about the risks and talk about costbenefit analysis and then come up with some mitigations to fix that.

Um it's a little bit harder when that spectre doesn't yet exist. It's not tangible right now. Um, so I think to to to go back to your question in terms of actual responsibility, um, you'll find that most of the crypto that you depend on is not your crypto, right? Like you you you are largely a a taker of the crypto sort of ecosystem and you're less a maker. um that means you don't have a ton of influence um on all of your critical dependencies, but nevertheless, you have the responsibility to understand where where those risks lie, what your dependencies are.

Um and and then figure out, you know, what level of influence do you have on those things, right? Um the the one that people always forget is the hyperscalers, like the clouds, like like Mer was saying, right? like we're hyperfocused as an industry on like my wallet's going to get popped and I'm going to lose my money, but like you're using an API in AWS or GCP or whatever that isn't quantum safe yet or you're using the wrong like TLS library. Um, so to to take it back to answer your question in terms of responsibility, um, you have to be the master of your own destiny. You have to understand your whole sort of crypto supply chain uh and work to fix what what you have the ability to fix.

Okay? Okay, Meera, there's a lot for everybody to kind of be thinking about is to to prioritize what what we need to focus on first. How do we do that? I know you talk a lot about this um harvest first, decrypt later risk that's out there and uh but how should people um assess all the things that they have to look at in order to prioritize what they need to work on as far as uh protecting things?

Okay. Um so unfortunately you at the end of the day you have to protect everything. So that that's just a non-starter. Um you just have to as you said you have to uh go through all your dependencies find out what they are and systematically upgrade. Now the problem we have with the harvest now decrypt later attack is you know you're sending messages over TLS you have um some data in the cloud.

If it's not quantum secure, uh, an attacker could suck it all up, put it in a database, and in five, 10 years when quantum computers are powerful enough, decrypt it. Now, as a security professional, I'm going to analyze um the priority of data in the standard way. What do we prioritize? Personally identifiable information, which is like your p your payroll, for example, and also keys. Um, now in the context of blockchain, we're concerned about uh signature keys, we're concerned about keys that protect other keys.

So, for example, if you upgrade your wallet and you have now a postquantum wallet with postquantum keys, but you're keeping them in the cloud protected with classical cryptography or you've transmitted it from to a postquantum cloud, but you do it over pre-quantum TLS, um, you have a problem. Now, you're going to be upgrading everything with peacemail. That's just the nature of the beast. But that means you kind of have to keep track. I've upgraded this little piece to postquantum.

But once I've upgraded the second piece, I have to check, okay, maybe I have to rotate these keys again and again and again as I'm systematically and methodically upgrading my entire infrastructure to postquantum.

So you said it could be four or five years before these computers are powerful enough. So Yun, what is the risk? What what's the danger? What's the cost for organizations to just let's wait a little bit until this risk is more imminent to start working on this transition?

That will certainly happen. There will be you won't get 100% of the affected organizations to move and migrate in a timely manner. Um you're going to have stragglers just like any kind of u software upgrade, security upgrades is that you know the attackers go for the weakest servers, right? and uh they'll find the weak point and try to try to go laterally. Um you're going to have those issues.

I think the most important thing is that like like Mera specified, you first identify your most important assets and try to get them under control first, right? There's going to be various TLS versions with postquantum cryptography in there. um they're you know they're available and uh most of them are in kind of a beta state but um you know you could use it and uh try to try to protect some of your um data that's transiting um you know but I think you got to look to the future as to what may happen and um you know we're not just facing a quantum adversary right that we're not facing a quantum threat only we're facing AI threats

right so just in July they didn't use quantum computers. They used clawed mythos to you know basically show that this candidate postquantum cryptography algo called uh hawk was uh you know not as strong as it supposedly was. Now understand that this hawk algorithm was being examined by the NIST's experts for three years over three rounds. So that's not like cursory examination, right? This has survived round after round and this AI took it out because it it showed that it's it's actually weaker than you thought.

And the developers of that algo said they pulled it out within 24 hours. So quantum is is going to be here, but the threat already exists. And anybody using, you know, that kind of access to AI to weaken or figure out how to how to weaken it so that they can now break something, they may not be telling you that. What do you do with that, right? So, so the threats are real and and the premise of all this is that and mirror correct me if I if I if I say a falsehood, but there's only ever been one cryptographic algo that's been provably secure and it's called the one-time pad.

And oh, so so I I passed that one, right? And um but that's the problem. The one-time pad is the stuff that you see in the movies where they crack open the little code and they use it once, right? And that's a variation of it, but but it's practically useless for the networks. And um but think about what I just said.

There's only one provably secure algo. That means everything else we've been using and we will use until some brilliant person figures out how to prove it for sure. We're it's all best guesses. And best guesses means that it could change at any time because it could f it could fail. And that's a big problem.

Well, I'd like to bring this kind of to make this a little practical and and for the audience here to be able to walk away with some ideas on what to do. Um, let's talk about what responsible preparation looks like and you I'll stick with you for a moment. You talk a lot about uh crypto agility. Can you define for us in simple terms what that means exactly and why is it so important for blockchain?

So, I'm not a martial arts guy, but I I I grew up on that stuff, right? watching it on TV. And you know there there's like a big thing when you when you follow like Bruce Lee movies, right? And what his method is, his method was never to do just one style

is match the style of the guy that's fighting you and uh and then do other stuff, right? So that means agility. And that's what crypto agility is. the ability to change cryptographic algos when you need to, when you want to, and where you want to. And that is something that is almost never given to um managers, users.

It's done at the systems application levels and they're usually hardcoded. So even in TLS, it's very difficult to manage what algo you're going to be, you know, connecting at. It does that automatically and then it goes lowest common denominator. So it's like great, we just now agreed to do the worst possible thing we could do, right? [laughter] And so what we're doing is we have we actually have technology.

We have 41 patents around it and um it allows you to change cryptography per message. The way that translates to blockchains is that we have a product called QLEX that allows you to change cryptography, the digital signature type per transaction under the digital asset owner's control. Your asset, you should be able to lock it the way you want to. That's that's what we say.

Nice. Now, Meera, um, kind of switching topics a little bit, but I know we've got some builders in the room. not everything's going to be able to migrate over to this postquantum protection. So I'm thinking about legacy assets and dormant accounts and what should they be considering when they're looking at things like that that aren't going to migrate over.

Okay. So as a builder you should migrate over or your infrastructure is going to die but uh your customers might not do it in time and I feel we have both an ethical responsibility and realistically we also will have a legal responsibility to help recover our customer accounts. Um there's a legal doctrine called as Shiet which basically says just because your account is dormant or maybe your password has leaked doesn't mean you lose ownership of the keys and this legal doctrine basically governs your responsibility to take care of your customer and what happens based on time to that account. Um thankfully the technology does exist to help people recover their accounts. So for example, your ECDSA key is no longer uh secure in quantum world in the sense that it can't be used to prove ownership of the account.

However, if you used a seed phrase to generate that key, we could that process is still secure and you could um if you could use a uh ZK stark, that's the postquantum version of ZK or you use u um a T in Amazon cloud, you could then use this to prove ownership of an account. So as a builder, you need to start thinking what are you going to do about your customers who don't basically follow your transition plan.

Okay, Max, a final question. Knowing that there's we've got a lot of work to do to prepare for this, what can organizations do to prepare for these future quantum threats without taking away attention and resources from the work that they have to do today to to address the threats that they're dealing with today? Yeah, it's a bit of a loaded question. I think like we have to come to the conclusion that you should invest resources. Um, you you you you should be, you know, following the guidance of all the large bodies out there and like then there's a ton of guidance.

Um, and and working your sort of postquantum mitigations into your security program. Um, if that means new hires, it means new hires, right? Like it just is what it is. this is a new threat and uh as an industry we have to adapt to it. Um but at the end of the day the the boring answer is you have to invest um and prioritize based on your risk right so you might have an outsized risk uh against one of the hyperscalers or against a specific library that you have to use or against a specific blockchain.

Um, so you should start from there, right? Take take a a a problem that's absolutely massive and daunting, even if you're a small company, right? To kind of figure out how you're going to approach this and break it down the same way we we've been breaking down cyber security problems for the past 30 years. Start where with where where the risk is. Um, and then move on from there.

And you'll end up growing something internally where you'll you'll reach a level of maturity where you understand exactly what you know the the the quantum risk is. Uh, and you know, you'll you'll find yourself at the end of the journey and you'll be postquantum safe.

Great advice. Uh, I know we're kind of behind schedule a little bit, so I was going to help kind of pick it up uh, save a little time here, but I'd love to just uh, open it up to the audience here and see what questions you have uh, for our panelists. If anybody has any questions,

want them super easy.

Yes. So, as a cryptographer, I'm really really sad about quantum because just as ZK um has become finally in coming into its own and things like Groth and Plonc has finally become viable and fast enough for us to be basically proving that I know a secret without telling you what it is. I know my credentials without telling you what they are. Suddenly we have quantum coming along and yes we have ZK Starks which we can use if we absolutely need to and um in some cases we will be but they're huge. We are moving from very small constantsiz proofs to basically proofs which are linear in the size of the statements.

And so we are definitely losing a lot of usability and composability of different primitives that made crypto really fun in the 90s and 2000s.

Thank you. What other questions do we have for the panel? No other questions. So, I will uh actually ask the panelist uh one last final kind of lightning round question. If you were to have the audience walk away with one action item or one big idea that you would like them to embrace from our conversation today, what would that be?

And I'll start with uh start with you Mera.

Okay. So, um, my takeaway unfortunately is really, really boring, which is go and scan your codebase, identify where you're using crypto, identify what libraries you're dependent on and where what crypto they're using, and basically map out your entire attack surface and then go talk to your vendors and ask them how they're doing.

Sounds like good solid advice. Thank you, Meera Max.

Um, yeah, I think just like cooler heads prevail, man. Like just like this is a hard problem. is a massive problem. Um, there are solutions out there. They are good solutions.

Like Meera said, map out what you care about, map out where your dependencies are, baby step your way to the end, but you have to make it to the end.

And you and I'll give you the final word.

Sure. Um, you know, since we're in a blockchain conference, I'll put it into that context. Um in cryptography it's been very very difficult to um you know put a dollar on how much that security is going to cost us or you know what's the risk but in the in terms of blockchain it is incredibly clear there's a dollar value to your digital asset that's protected by that digital signature. So, what I find um unbelievable and and that we kind of accept is that it's like, you know, if if Scott bought a house in this village and I'm the mayor, I come I'm I come over to Scott's place and go, "Hey, Scott, welcome to the neighborhood. Here are the two types of locks that you're allowed to put on your front door."

And anytime you unlock and lock your door, I'm going to charge you, right? Would you buy that house? Probably not. But we accept that proposition in the blockchain world day in day out from day one. And what I'm saying is that your transactions and your digital assets on that chain provide the value for that chain itself, that entire blockchain.

So demand better. And if if what Meera and Max have said is that it's going to take a tremendous amount of work and expenses to do this, let's do it once instead of doing it again and again, right? Because it's everyone is going to be very very painful and we're all going to be time crunched. Let's do it correctly and do it in a crypto agile way so that you could change it and give control over that security um to the ultimate user which is the digital asset owner and the end product is that the blockchain is doesn't have much liability. Right?

I love that. So what I've heard today is that basically we need to understand where cryptography lives. We've got to sign some accountabilities. We've got to design some systems to make sure that they're adaptable and then obviously not let fear or misinformation kind of guide us or or influence our decisions. Is that fair?

All right, ladies and gentlemen, if you can help me thank once again Meera Balenki, Max Scorchain Mackey, and you our panelists today for their expertise and please enjoy the rest of Boston Blockchain Week. Thank you everybody.