Quantum Startups Aim to Future-Proof Corporate Security

Existing cybersecurity measures deployed by banks and companies don’t stand a chance against quantum computers, speakers at Toronto’s Venture North conference warned.

“Bank encryption will be rendered completely vulnerable when hackers get quantum computing,” ISARA Corporation VP Paul Lucier said, adding that the technology will likely become widely available within the next nine years.

Why Quantum Computers Threaten Encryption

The threat posed by quantum computers to cybersecurity is down to the speed at which encryption can be brute forced. A 10-letter password that contains punctuation and at least one number and capital letter would take roughly four weeks to crack, according to Dashlane.

If we take Google’s claims of the speed of the D-Wave processor at face value, with a quantum computer this time would be reduced to 0.02 seconds.

Speed is only part of the story. Much of the encryption that protects online banking and e-commerce relies on math problems that are extremely hard for ordinary computers, like factoring very large numbers. A large enough quantum computer could, in principle, solve some of those problems far faster, by working in a fundamentally different way. That’s why researchers talk about needing new kinds of encryption altogether, not just longer passwords.

There’s also a timing problem. Data that’s stolen today while it’s still encrypted could be stored and decrypted years later, once the hardware exists. For information that needs to stay secret for a long time, like financial records or trade secrets, the risk starts well before the first powerful quantum computer is switched on.

ISARA’s Quantum-Resistant Toolkit

ISARA works with organizations to future-proof them against forthcoming technology with “quantum resistant” security. They have released a toolkit aimed at developers in the security space, which consists of drop-in algorithm replacements for current technology.

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The Bigger Threat Behind Email Hacks

Christian Weedbrook of CipherQ, another startup focused on corporate security, said e-mail hacks such as the one sustained by Ashley Madison were like “a mosquito bite to the nuclear bomb of quantum that is coming in a few year’s time.”

E-mail hacks have lost the corporate world some $2.3 billion in since January 2015. As well as malware, an increasingly common vector has been social engineering: legitimate-seeming e-mails posing as requests for high-value bank transfers are often targeted at CEOs or finance officers.

Weedbrook added that cash scams are not the only issue. Hackers may use compromised systems to steal confidential information and offer it to a competitor.

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Canada’s Quantum Corridor

ISARA is based out of Kitchener-Waterloo, a region that produced BlackBerry and is becoming a North American center for quantum technology research. CipherQ is based in Toronto.

“Canada is a remarkable country to be doing quantum technology,” said Weedbrook.

What Happened Next

The warnings at Venture North turned into a real, global effort. In August 2024, the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology released its first three finalized post-quantum encryption standards, designed to withstand an attack by a quantum computer, and encouraged system administrators to start moving to them. NIST said the algorithms were ready for immediate use.

The timeline has proved harder to pin down than the 2016 predictions suggested. Even in 2024, NIST described a device able to break current encryption as something that some experts predict “could appear within a decade.” The hardware has kept improving, though. In December 2024, Google unveiled Willow, a quantum chip that it said performed a benchmark computation in under five minutes that would take a supercomputer 10 septillion years.

ISARA is still in the business it described in 2016. The company, which says it was founded by leaders from BlackBerry’s security division, now sells tools to help organizations inventory their cryptography and move to quantum-safe systems.

Christian Weedbrook went on to found Xanadu, a Toronto quantum computing company, in 2016. In May 2021, BetaKit reported that Xanadu had raised $120 million CAD in a round led by Bessemer Venture Partners to build a photonic quantum computer, one that uses light. In 2022, Xanadu researchers reported in Nature that their Borealis processor had achieved quantum computational advantage. The company’s shares now trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker XNDU.

What It Means for Businesses

The practical advice hasn’t changed much since 2016, but it’s more urgent. Start by knowing where your organization uses encryption, which is often harder than it sounds. Prioritize the data that has to stay secret the longest. And when you buy or build security systems, favor ones that can switch algorithms without a major rebuild, so moving to the new standards is an upgrade rather than a rescue mission.