This year’s ETSI/IQC Quantum Safe Workshop was held in London, UK on September 13th to 15th. A large part of the event was focussed on a series of panel discussions tackling various issues surrounding post-quantum security. These included a panel with views from the governments of different countries on their approach to quantum-safe security and views of the future, the importance of standardization of post-quantum solutions, available technologies to deal with the quantum threat, and joint global efforts to tackling the quantum threat. In addition to this a number of individual talks were given including one from Lily Chan of NIST who gave an overview of that agency’s efforts to standardize post-quantum cryptography.  

Cambridge University in the UK was this year’s host for the Qcyrpt conference. The conference took place on September 18th to 22nd and included various talks about exciting developments in QKD from researchers around the world. Information on the conference can be found on their website at http://2017.qcrypt.net/. Of special interest to us was the inspirational talk from Cheggzhi Peng of UTSC on their satellite-based QKD program. 

This month’s Cyber Security Meetup took place at RBC Waterpark Place on August 24th. This was a special month for us as QEYnet’s Cordell Grant was one of the two speakers. In his talk, he gave the audience an overview of the threats of quantum computers to current encryption schemes and an introduction to QKD. 

This month’s Cyber Security Meetup took place on March 18th at the Toronto Public Library’s Northern District branch. Ed Dubrovsky gave a presentation on cyber security lessons from the field and Jamie Baxter gave a talk on why joining a “capture the flag team” is a great way to develop “fingers-on-keyboard” skills. We highly recommend the Cyber Security Meetup events to anyone in the Toronto area who is interested in cyber security as the event draws a large and diverse crowd.

ID Quantique hosted their annual winter school last week (January 14th to 20th) in the beautiful town of Les Diablerets, Switzerland. The winter school is a great introduction to the QKD and the state of the field. The winter school is presented as a series of lectures on different topics ranging from the background of QKD, an introduction to quantum computing, QKD in space, quantum hacking and includes some hands-on work with ID-Quantiuque’s QKD systems. All of this takes place alongside fun winter activities like skiing and curling.