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Quantum technologies are expected to transform defence and security through advances in sensing, secure communications, navigation, computing, and decision support. The Quantum Defence Innovation Secure Hub (DISH) will provide a secure environment where government, industry, academia, and innovators can collaborate to rapidly develop, test, validate, and transition these technologies into operational capabilities for the Canadian Armed Forces. The hub will strengthen Canada’s technological advantage, improve operational effectiveness, and reduce vulnerabilities in contested environments, including threats such as GPS spoofing.
A University of Calgary-led consortium will receive $20.3 million over two years to establish and operate the Quantum DISH in Calgary. Bringing together organizations from Canada’s quantum, defence, and innovation sectors, the consortium will help accelerate the transition of promising Canadian quantum technologies from research into mission-ready capabilities that support Canada’s defence and security priorities.
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“Quantum will shape the next generation of defence capabilities, and Canada must be prepared to lead—not follow,” says David J. McGuinty, Canadian Minister of National Defence.
“Through the Quantum Defence Innovation Secure Hub, we’re bringing together Canadian researchers, innovators, industry, and government to accelerate Made-in-Canada quantum technologies into mission-ready capabilities that strengthen the operational advantage of the Canadian Armed Forces while growing Canada’s sovereign defence industrial base.”
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Agreed, poor writing there.
That being said, the idea as a whole isn’t bad from what super surface level understanding I have about quantum computing.
Quantum computing has the potential to break a lot of encryption. It’s not there yet, but definitely seems to be going in that direction. Encryption breaking would be catastrophic for defense, and literally all kinds of civil applications. This becomes (in my eyes) a legitimate national security threat.
From what I understand, they’re hinting at Canada proactively developing this offensive tech (hinted as domestic defense industry bs) while exploring anything and everything to do with quantum resistant systems of encryption and their implementation in the Canadian economy.
People have been working on those solutions for a decade already. Post-quantum cryptography standards are already in the stages of regulator approval for use in industry down south and will proliferate quickly as they can work on the systems we already have. It’s likely to be a solved problem before it even becomes a problem.
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Regular non-ai brute forcing can do billions of guesses per second on a single machine. But that’s still not helpful because your estimate of “millions of possibilities” is off by several orders of magnitude. For a 128 bit key, there are 2^128 (~ 3.4 x 10^38, or 340 billion billion billion billion) possible keys. You’re not brute forcing that.
Additionally, modern crypto is not susceptible to known plaintext attacks (implied by your “if it’s a message, not that hard…” statement.) It doesn’t help you guess the answer if you know whether the encrypted message you’re attacking is a password or an English phrase.
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None of that is correct.
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