Alice & Bob

Turns out we don't just exercise our brains. 😏 Football ⚽, volleyball 🏐, rock climbing 🧗, cycling 🚴, Pilates 🧘, running 🏃, swimming 🏊... if there's a sport, chances are there's a Slack channel for it at Alice & Bob. Whether it's training for a marathon or just getting out after work, there's always someone up for it. Just don't be surprised if your post-run chat ends up being about quantum error correction. 🤓 #Startup #Activities #Sports

🧮 A week after an AI model found a weakness in HAWK, a new quantum algorithm claims to break the maths behind most post-quantum cryptography schemes. 📝 A preliminary paper just dropped describing a new polynomial-time quantum algorithm against the family of problems that includes lattice cryptography, one of the most famous post-quantum approaches. ⚠️ Big disclaimer: the paper is not peer reviewed, and the author labeled it preliminary himself. In 2024 a comparable lattice claim was refuted within days. 🧠 That said, this comes from Daniel Simon, whose 1994 algorithm directly inspired Shor's, the one that breaks RSA and elliptic curves, most of the encryption today. 🔍 If it holds (we are already starting to see cracks in the proofs), the stakes are bigger than last week's. HAWK’s flaw hit one candidate scheme nobody had deployed yet. This claim targets the mathematical assumptions under the whole lattice family, ones NIST has selected to replace RSA and ECC. 📈 Cryptanalysis is active like never before. It is moving on several fronts at once: mathematics, quantum computing, and AI, and we expect more results like this in the coming months. ⚛️ Meanwhile, the quantum computers that would run these algorithms are being built, fast. Replacements have to be trusted before those machines arrive, and post-quantum cryptography cannot afford to be left without options. ✅ Bottom line: these schemes earn trust by surviving attempts to break them. To the cryptography and quantum communities: keep pushing post-quantum cryptography research. What matters is having options we can trust before the hardware catches up. 🔗 Here's the paper in question: 👉 https://lnkd.in/e7gVJc7H #QuantumComputing #PostQuantumCryptography #Cryptanalysis #NIST

Meet the person behind almost every Alice & Bob illustration you have seen in the recent past. 🐈⬛ If it is yellow and black and has a cat, chances are he drew it. The t-shirts, the notebooks, the illustrations, Sigma the cat, so much of what you see from us came off his drawing board. Making a brand's visual universe come to life is not easy. Doing it for a quantum computing company is another challenge, when almost every brief we send comes with a new physics concept to draw. 😮💨 This is an appreciation post for Guillaume Gennet, for making Alice & Bob look and feel like Alice & Bob. 🎨 #Quantum #Design #Illustration #Branding

Oak Ridge National Laboratory just laid out its roadmap for quantum HPC at scale. Last week, Alice & Bob attended the event, where Georgia Tourassi shared 5 predictions for where quantum computing is headed... 1. Fault tolerance arrives sooner than many think 2. Software becomes more valuable than hardware 3. Open software ecosystems outperform proprietary stacks 4. Integrated scientific facilities become the competitive advantage 5. Hybrid scientific computing becomes the default A few highlights for us: ⚙️ Every past computing revolution ran on open standards nobody owned, think MPI, OpenMP, Kokkos. Quantum needs the same thing. That's what openQSE is for. 🏃And it's already in motion: Oak Ridge is running real demos, checking quantum simulations against neutron scattering data, and testing quantum error correction on on-prem systems from Quantum Brilliance, IQM Quantum Computers, and Riverlane. Kevin D. Kissell represented Alice & Bob at the event. What stood out to us is that when you design hardware, software and applications together from the start, fault tolerance stops being a far-off goal and gets a lot closer. That's exactly what ORNL is doing, and we think more of the field should follow. The second photo tells the story of the room 📸 : a quantum company's HPC advisor (Kevin D. Kissell, from Alice & Bob), a US gov't CIO and CTO (Kris Torgerson and Scott Atchley), and an HPC company's quantum advisor (Michael Ferguson), all at the same table. #QuantumComputing #HPC #CatQubits #openQSE #FaultTolerance #QHPC #QuantumErrorCorrection

🔐 Anthropic just used Mythos, its internal AI model, to find a real weakness in HAWK, one of NIST's post-quantum signature candidates. Before you read too much into that, nothing needs patching today. HAWK is still just a candidate, not something anyone has deployed, so no real-world system is affected. 📰 On one front, AI is stress-testing cybersecurity better than expected. On another, quantum research keeps finding more capable algorithms to break cryptographic protocols, with some brilliant minds in that space (Craig Gidney, André Schrottenloher, Élie Gouzien, André Chailloux, among others). Finding schemes that survive all this testing is really the whole point, and this week's news is a good example. 🧮 Here's the gist: HAWK's security depends on a hard lattice problem, and the new attack spotted specific patterns in that lattice nobody had exploited before, letting you search for the secret key a lot faster. 🧰 The bigger takeaway for us is that Anthropic built CryptanalysisBench, a benchmark for evaluating how capable AI models are at breaking classical ciphers. At Alice & Bob, we're building the same kind of tool for quantum, to test if cryptographic schemes actually hold up against quantum computers before anyone relies on them. ✅ Our take is that this is the standardization process working exactly as it's supposed to. HAWK survived two rounds of expert review and still got caught out, this time by an AI model in about 60 hours. Good news, not bad, since the same tools finding these weaknesses can help the field get to solid, quantum-resistant standards faster, and with a lot more confidence. 🔗 Article in discussion: https://lnkd.in/dv3-fm8c #Cryptography #QuantumComputing #NIST #HAWK #AISecurity #Cryptanalysis

Out of office, in Chantilly 🏰 ☀️ Good weather, good company, lots of team games, cycling, yoga, a Chantilly cream making workshop, live music, dinner, karaoke. We'll keep the karaoke videos off LinkedIn. 🙃 #Offsite #Startup

Hackathons have a way of surfacing good ideas fast. ⚡ This one, from Y-Quantum conducted by Yale Quantum Institute, is a good example of why we keep showing up to them. 🎯 We handed the teams a hard problem: how do you keep a cat qubit stabilized when the hardware around it won't stop drifting? 🐈 They came back with a solution. A good one, actually. Tymofii Baranenko, Leon Sascha Katarzynski, Jack Ploof, @Batu Y. and Alex Wong from Harvard University tried two different approaches to tune the system, tested them against multiple flavors of drift, and even modeled moon-shaped cat qubits along the way, because apparently regular cats weren't enough of a challenge. 🌙 Their best model pushed the phase-flip lifetime to 78.3 µs which is no small feat. Watching young talent do rigorous work like this is very encouraging, and publishing their project on our website blog is our small way of cheering them on. 🏆 Congrats to the winning team, read the full blog below. 👇 https://lnkd.in/ef7h2F7K #QuantumComputing #CatQubit #QuantumErrorCorrection #FaultTolerantQuantum #Hackathon

Want better qubits? Well, “draw” better junctions. ✏️⚛️ That’s exactly what we’re doing by plugging GenISys GmbH’s tool into our nanofab workflow. 🧪🛠️ Making quantum chips is like sketching at the nanoscale: we “draw” patterns into the material using a beam of electrons, which then define the tiny structures on our superconducting chips. The challenge? More often than not, electrons don’t go where you want them to... As they go through the resist and substrate, they scatter and “blur” the pattern. This is the proximity effect, and it can distort josephson junction dimensions (which are the key superconducting patterns) and even ruin entire chips. ❌ This is where GenISys GmbH's simulation tool comes in. It predicts how electrons will scatter before fabrication, enabling us to tune the exposure dose in the right places so the final chip matches our design. 🗺️ ✅ At Alice & Bob, advancing our cat‑qubit chips means testing a variety of designs at a rapid pace. This tool lets us fab quicker 🔁 and come back with chips that are better and more reliable. Excited to work with GenISys as we develop the next and best generations of our cat‑qubit chips! 🐈⬛🚀 #QuantumComputing #CatQubits #QuantumChips

It takes a village to build a fault-tolerant quantum computing software stack! 🏘️ Our US General Manager, Juliette Peyronnet, spent the past few weeks discussing what should be the best collaboration environment, at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Science Advisory Committee Townhall on Quantum Computing and Quantum.Tech World. A few things worth sharing: 🏃♀️➡️ Quantum Software needs to accelerate: At the DOE Townhall, alongside IBM, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Infleqtion, NVIDIA and national labs including Sandia National Laboratories, Berkeley Lab and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, we made the case that hardware development is making fast progress, but the risk is that the software lags behind. Fault-tolerant compilation is still underinvestigated and understaffed. AI can help close that gap, but it also takes domain scientists, classically trained software architects and compilation experts, and the HPC community building together instead of in silos. 🤖 🤝 No one is building this alone: At Quantum.Tech World, we shared our vision for scalable quantum computing with cat qubits, while many conversations across the event focused on HPC integration and the partnerships needed to make large-scale quantum systems a reality. 📈 The vision is turning into results: Juliette shared where Alice & Bob stands today, our first system sold, a partnership with a leading industry player and a new product development lab underway 🏗️. 🎯 Our ask: Having a dedicated testbed to define QPU-HPC design, and an open-source ecosystem with shared governance across the labs, industry and academia, so software is just as ready as hardware by 2028. 🌐 Thank you to everyone who made time for these conversations, including Anna Grassellino, Martin Schmidt, Mark Papermaster, and many others. More to come. 🔜 #QuantumComputing #FaultTolerant #HPC #DOE #OpenSource

💡 How close can AI get to a quantum computer? Closer than you might think but not in the way you'd expect. 🤷♀️ Last week at ISC High Performance, one question kept coming up: as quantum processors scale, what happens to all the classical infrastructure around them? Our latest blog written by Kevin D. Kissell, the designated Quantum HPC Architect from our team tackles one piece of that puzzle! 🧩 For fast superconducting hardware like cat qubits, some control cycles must run within ~1μs, AI can't fit inside that budget. But classical measurements can be copied. Decouple AI into a parallel path, let it analyze data at its own pace, and you still get continuous calibration and optimization without touching the critical loop. NVIDIA's NVQLink makes that architecture practical. ⚛️ Basically, it's real-time control and AI-driven calibration, running side by side.📖 Give the blog a read here 👉 https://lnkd.in/e_66dwyK #QuantumComputing #AI #HPC #NVQLink #CatQubits #FaultTolerance #CUDAQ #ISC26