By Yolanda Sanz, Technical Director, GSMA
At last year’s MWC Las Vegas conference, the GSMA established the Post Quantum Telco Network task force, initiated by IBM and Vodafone, with the goal of uniting the ecosystem to prepare telcos for the quantum era.
The task force has gained significant momentum and now includes more than 50 companies and over 20 major operators. Now, at the MWC Las Vegas 2023 conference, the task force has released its “Guidelines for Quantum Risk Management for Telco” whitepaper. This paper is intended to support telcos in their risk assessment process and provides an analysis of how some commonly used risk assessment frameworks may be adapted specifically for the telecommunications industry, using relevant use cases as examples.
The telecommunications industry is vital to how the world connects, from how we work and play, to emergency response and critical national infrastructure. Companies work continuously to ensure these networks are secure and new challenges need to be addressed in a timely way. Quantum computers will be able to solve mathematical challenges beyond the reach of classical techniques, and a thriving research community is exploring how their capabilities may be applied for positive benefit across multiple industry sectors – and society at large.
While precise timelines are uncertain, it is also accepted that quantum computers powerful enough to break the most common encryption standards used today will become available in the future. That means the encryption we currently use to protect telco systems, particularly public-key encryption, will be vulnerable once these cryptographically relevant quantum computers reach sufficient maturity.
