Will Quantum Computing Destroy Cryptography: A Podcast with Taher Elgamal of Salesforce

On a recent edition of the Early Adopter Research (EAR) podcast, EAR’s Dan Woods covered cryptography, a crucial topic in cybersecurity. To delve into the issue, he spoke with Taher Elgamal, CTO for security at Salesforce. Elgamal was one of more than 30 contributors to the upcoming book by Fortinet’s CISO, Phil Quade, The Digital Big Bang: The Hard Stuff, the Soft Stuff and the Future of Cybersecurity. The Digital Big Bang book puts forth a history-style explanation of cybersecurity and it proposes a framework for creating a truly scientific approach to cybersecurity. Phil Quade’s ambition is to find a way to systematically address many of the problems that have risen because cybersecurity was not properly incorporated into the design of the internet. Taher is an expert in cryptography and he spoke about what cybersecurity professionals should know about cryptography. Woods, a technology analyst and founder of earlyadopter.com, played a role as editor for Phil Quade’s book which came out in preview in April but will be published in August of 2019 by John Wiley.

* 1:55 – Why the fears of quantum computing breaking cryptography are overblown
* 3:30 – How to be safe in a quantum powered future
* 6:00 – Do vendors need to become more agile?

Listen to the podcast below or read an edited Q&A of the conversation here: