SNIA Developer Conference September 15-17, 2025 | Santa Clara, CA
Basil Hess
Research Engineer
IBM Research Europe
Basil Hess is a Research Engineer at IBM Research Europe. His focus is on preparing the cryptographic infrastructure for the quantum era. He contributes to the NIST PQC standardization process as part of the SIKE submission team. He is also a team member of Open Quantum Safe, the OSS community’s initiative to support the development and prototyping of quantum safe cryptography. Basil holds a PhD in Information Systems and a MSc in Computer Science, both from ETH Zurich.
Related Sessions
Quantum Safe Cryptography for Long Term Security
Quantum computers with the capability to threaten the cryptography used today may seem a long way off, but they already pose a threat to both data and systems that we are protecting today. This talk will introduce the quantum threat and discuss why this is already a topic for today and not sometime in the future when large quantum systems will emerge, with particular considerations for long-term secure storage. This will be followed by an overview of the race to standardize new cryptographic algorithms that are secure even against large quantum computers of the future. The new quantum safe algorithms will bring a lot of diversity to the cryptographic landscape. It is expected that multiple schemes will be standardized, based on different mathematical problems such as lattices, isogenies of elliptic curves or error-correcting codes. Different performance and bandwidth characteristics will further increase the complexity of cryptographic management and will pose a demand for cryptographic agility. We will further give an overview of ongoing projects in quantum safety in areas such as in storage and will also show how developers can already today prototype quantum safe applications using open-source projects like Open Quantum Safe.