Provable Cybersecurity: How Device-Independent Cryptography Changes the Game
13:05 - 13:35, 20th of May (Wednesday) 2026 / R&D & Cybersec
Today's encryption protects banking, healthcare, government, and critical infrastructure — but it has an expiration date. Adversaries are already harvesting encrypted data to decrypt them using powerful computers, with the growing probability of Q-Day coming in the next years. The cybersecurity community is racing to respond with two complementary approaches: post-quantum cryptography (new mathematical algorithms) and quantum key distribution (QKD), which uses the laws of physics rather than computational hardness to guarantee security.
This talk will give a practical overview of where quantum-safe communication stands today. I will explain how QKD works, why current commercial systems still carry hidden vulnerabilities through side-channel attacks on their hardware, and how device-independent QKD — the strongest form of quantum security — eliminates the need to trust the devices entirely. I will present recent progress that is bringing device-independent QKD from theory toward real-world, long-distance deployment, and discuss what this means for the IT industry's roadmap to quantum-safe infrastructure.
