AT&T is aiming to become “quantum ready” by the year 2025, claimed a quantum security and preparedness team member during this week’s AT&T Security Conference.

The tier-one operator has been identifying its cryptographic assets, vetting post-quantum cryptography solutions, and taking trials to identify those solutions, according to Brian Miles, principal member of tech staff at AT&T. 

“We've got AT&T quantum ready on our roadmap by 2025,” Miles said, adding that that doesn’t mean the company will be fully quantum secured. 

“This just means that we have done all our due diligence,” he explained. “And we have a clear path forward and we have all the solutions identified to target and address some of the different problems posed by quantum computing.”

That effort should put the operator in a better position before the cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) emerges. CRQC is defined as a quantum computer that reaches the compute capability to break an RSA-2048 key using Shor's algorithm, according to Miles. Shor’s algorithm is a quantum computer algorithm developed in 1994 by American mathematician Peter Shor.

The consensus of industry experts for now has identified the year 2034 as a potential target date for CRQC to emerge, he said. 

Amid the “harvest now, decrypt later” threats, more organizations started their quantum preparation journey. One of the first steps that experts recommended is to understand organizations’ potential exposures.

Miles also urges organizations to implement cryptography agility, which is a framework or architecture that allows companies to replace their cryptographic primitives, underlying cryptography, and encryption algorithms with little or no impact on the existing applications. 

“In a nutshell, that means you get off board your cryptography, get it out of your applications, get it more centralized, ultimately put automation in place to make the underlying infrastructure [transition] relatively painless,” he explained. 

The next significant step is to identify the cryptographic assets and who has the responsibility for that inventory within the company, Miles noted.

“It's incredibly important to get started on a crypto-agile architecture roadmap within your company quickly,” he said. “The whole crypto-agile architecture at least gives you the tools and the ability to pivot to different cryptography on short notice.”