• Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) 
• Cisco Systems, Inc. 
• Cryptosense SA 
• Crypto4A Technologies, Inc. 
• InfoSec Global 
• ISARA Corporation 
• Microsoft 
• Samsung SDS Co., Ltd. 
• SandboxAQ 
• Thales DIS CPL USA, Inc. 
• Thales Trusted Cyber Technologies 
• VMware, Inc. 

What Next?

Matthew Scholl is the chief of the computer security division of NIST’s Information Technology Laboratory.  In July, Scholl briefed NIST’s Information Security and Privacy Advisory Board.  He spoke about the public/private collaboration and the benchmarks and challenges ahead:

• “‘While we have identified the algorithms … there still is a significant and important block of work ahead of us.’
• Over the next, ‘good couple of months,’ [NIST] along with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the private-sector entities selected, will generate a primary set of standards for implementing the new algorithms.
• ‘We will work with the submission team and openly with the public community to define the specifics of those implementations so that they meet the requirements that NIST laid out in our initial Federal Register [notice] back in 2016 about the security strengths of those implementations.’
• ‘We will also decide on the implementation parameters … which will allow it to be built into commercial products with enough specificity that it can be interoperable, and that also we can ensure its correctness.’
• NIST and CISA have ‘a goal of mitigating as much of the quantum risk as is feasible,’ by 2035.
• To promote a sense of urgency, [Scholl] also cited a study by the Quantum Economic Development Consortia, which reported that it took five years for a single tech enterprise to transition internally to advanced encryption standards.
• ‘We’re in the window … to transition from a theoretical issue to an engineering issue,’ he said, noting implementers will endure ‘a kind of cryptographic turbulence’ over the next five to ten years.
• ‘We are updating our signature standard right now, which will be coming out very soon, Not only are we going to bring new items in but we’re going to be starting to drop items as well. It’s gonna be a little bit of a mixed bag … we are going to be pulling things from inventories.’ Up next to officially go is the use of a three-key triple data encryption standard, which NIST will disallow starting this December.”  (2)

Scholl also spoke directly about industry’s role in the effort:

• “‘We’re also going to be looking at what industry is using commercially, has been using historically safely and securely, and whether or not we should also be including that, even though they may or may not be quantum-safe going forward as well.’
• Beyond shaping the standardization process, industry will also have the opportunity to market another round of technology to federal agencies as part of the post-quantum cryptography initiative.
• ‘Border proxies that need line speed and security are hardwired, and so, my border firewalls are all in silicon rather than software. And they don’t update so there might be an opportunity for industry to resell to the government.’  (2)

Finally, to summarize the takeaways related to the building out of a QuantumComputing Ecosystem built for exponential speed and scale:

First, the Quantum Economic Development Consortia is a unique find and its marketing tagline is instructional:  The Quantum Consortium: Enabling the Quantum Ecosystem.

Scholl’s entire presentation was structurally ‘mapped’ to NSM10, which is validation that the document is having some success as a whole of government blueprint agencies are using for the implementation of Quantum ecosystem efforts.  As Scholl noted:  “‘One of the things that is going to have to happen with the NSM 10 work is for government to identify where those expenses are, where we don’t have the agility, where we’re gonna have to do some of these re-purchases and then start to plan and budget for that as well. So yeah, agility is going to be one of the things that makes me concerned.  Scholl added: ‘We are relying a lot on the industry side to help us do that.’” (2)  Scholl’s deck is really enlightening and actionable. Find it here.

According to nextgov.com Natasha Cohen, who is leading CISA’s part in the implementation process, joined Scholl in a presentation at NIST, where she spoke about risk awareness in the Federal IT ecosystem to “emphasize the extent to which a successful transition relies on industry doing its part:  ‘The vast majority of risk lies in the vendors,’ Cohen said. ‘And so if we can get the really important companies that provide the foundation for IT security and IT management in critical infrastructure to transition, then updating technologies to supported technologies—so moving unsupported technologies out of our ecosystem—we’ll get the vast majority of risk out of our ecosystem.'”

OODA Loop will continue to track the evolving interoperability and cooperative efforts between the OODA Loop Quantum List Companies, the 12 companies chosen by NIST for formal collaboration, DC-QNet, The National Quantum Initiative (NQI) and the NQI Advisory Committee.

In the meantime:  Are there other platforms, open-source architectures or ecosystem value proposition designs or innovative business models which the OODA Loop membership has experience with (or feels are deficient) in these current Quantum Computing Ecosystem efforts?  If so, drop us a note.

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