TRANSCRIPT
This episode has been automatically transcribed by AI, please excuse any typos or grammatical errors.

Chris: Victoria Kumar and Mark Carney are the founders and organizers of quantum village, which will debut next month at DEFCON 30. So today barcode is getting quantum Victoria mark. Welcome to the show.

Mark: Hello. Hello. Thank you for having us.

Chris: Absolutely. So, as you both know, I was hoping to have you both here on site for this conversation at the new barcode studio still in progress in Delaware.

Chris: But unfortunately that didn’t work out, but you both have Delaware connections, is that right?

Victoria: I do. yeah. I think everyone in the world who has a company might have a Delaware connection. Someone, someone did tell me the other day, I thought only companies live there, but no, I do quite often.

Mark: I was gonna say my main connection is knowing that friends who have companies there.

Chris: Well, it’s a plus that, you know, Delaware is a state because I often talk to people that I say Delaware, and they’re like, State is that in, in Delaware. Oh, wow.

Victoria: By Biden coming back and being president has been very helpful for that, cuz he’s been doing really good publicity for the state I had a lot of people being like, I know where you are now.

Chris: Yeah. Whether you’re for or against Biden, he at least put Delaware on the map. Exactly.

Victoria: So, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I do. I do. I’m a big fan of RO ho. Delaware, which he also likes. And I I’ve been on the bike route that he goes on. So I sort of feel

Victoria: fall there admit

Victoria: 15 years since I’d been on a bike and this was during pandemic. So it was one of the sort of few things you could do. And that sort of encouraged me to sort of get out there and get healthy, I guess.

Mark: That’s cool.

Chris: And mark, you’re currently in Paris, is

Mark: that right? I am currently in Paris. As of recording tomorrow, I am speaking at hack in Paris actually on post quantum cryptography and the quantum threat for enterprises.

Mark: So yeah, it’s kind of a nice arrangement that I get to try some of the material here first. Although obviously it’ll be heard later.

Chris: Yes. Not too much later. So hopefully if that. Session gets recorded. We can post it on the episode notes and, and point people that way. If not, we’ll, we’ll catch you at quantum village.

Chris: Oh, absolutely. But I do wanna ask you both and we can start with Victoria if you don’t mind. You know, talk to me about your evolution into security and how you personally became focused on quantum computing.

Victoria: Sure. Mine. I think like what I’m seeing, like a lot of people’s quite convoluted. I’ve actually got a art and design background.

Victoria: I spent some time, which I’m realizing is actually very helpful. I think you know, cybersecurity certainly is quite a multidisciplinary. Requires skill set. That’s very multidisciplinary. And then I moved into finance. So I’ve always understood the sort of business side. And that’s like the investing side and also on the sales side.

Victoria: So I did that. And then I started working with some startups, I think like everyone, these days sort of your right passage, it’s quite a nice way. Dipping your tone in the water, cuz then you startups like, oh wow. You know, someone with actual real life experience willing to work and working around the sort of machine learning.

Victoria: Applications around malware detection, things like that, all the, all the good and fun stuff wrapped into AI, which obviously, I think about five years ago, would’ve been known as snake oil in the security world, or certainly with, with a lot of suspicion, but then also a lot of adoration. And I think having witnessed that obviously with quantum computing, there was sort of some rumbles again about five years ago when there was sort of a resurgence.

Victoria: And certainly I think in the last year or two There’s been that kind of build up with a lot of people recognizing its power and its capabilities and that it’s sort of coming and that, you know, the defense capabilities and obviously the capabilities and then the really good, exciting ones that I think we’re gonna talk about as well.

Victoria: Yeah,

Chris: for sure. And mark, how about you?

Mark: I came to it. So I first egg counted quantum computing as like a module when I was studying. And I, I thought, oh, that’s really cool. And then promptly never thought of it again until someone said oh, what are we gonna do about the quantum threat? And I was like, what quantum threat, you know, being threatened by photons in a back alley.

Mark: But no, the quantum threat turns out it’s a real legitimate sort of idea. That quantum computing is gonna come to a level of maturity that causes problems for cybersecurity. So I was dealing with it from the my role as you know, I’m a cybersecurity researcher. And I advise a lot. So, you know, there’s all the doing, you know, pest or red team engagements and then inviting reports.

Mark: And then. When you do the research side, there’s also a lot of consultancy that goes with that, for sure. And so I was picking it up there and I wasn’t thinking too much of it. I found a few papers, I read them and the more I read them, the more I understood. And then I eventually pieced together this idea that I actually doing you know, doing more quantum stuff, learning quantum information theory more properly was very interesting.

Mark: And so I just carried on. So that’s kind of how I came to it more through a kind of a more sedate you know, work life kind of thing. Yeah. So ,

Chris: so mark, let me ask you this. Mm-hmm for those that are unfamiliar with quantum computing like myself, I haven’t done the research. I, I don’t have hands on experience with quantum computing.

Chris: And like Victoria mentioned, you know, I’ve seen the. The aggressive path that quantum computing has taken over the past few years. Yeah. I, is it possible that you could explain it to us in terms of what quantum computing is and what it

Mark: consists of? Yeah, sure. So a common misconception with quantum computing is that it’s just faster computing.

Mark: We’re used to seeing that Moore’s law growth we’re used to seeing, oh, if we just keep jamming transistors and jamming, powerization in, we get to somewhere faster. And there’s a misnomer. That quantum is just that it’s not quantum computing is not gonna make Microsoft flight simulator run any better or worse.

Mark: You’re gonna have to just give N V D yet more money and then it will work properly. I’m sure. So that’s what quantum computing isn’t what is it? It’s a way of looking at computation that is quite different. So we are used to bits. Okay. That’s the language of computers, bits, zeros, and ones. If you could imagine that you could have a bit as a little arrow pointing up and for, for a zero and pointing down for one, then you could imagine that arrow might be balanced between.

Mark: The two of them. And that’s a way of looking at superposition. The idea that you have this balanced kind of two states superimposed on each other, they’re equally likely. So when you do a measurement, that’s when you actually get the output from a quantum computer and the measurement says, oh, zero or one.

Mark: And what is different? Is that with a switch, with a transistor? When you ask it zero or one, we’ve built them to say 0 0, 0, 0, 0, or 1, 1, 1, 1, 1. They’ll give you the same answer. A content computer. Won’t it’ll give you a zero or one with a probability of zero or one. So it’s basically probabilistic computing.

Mark: Now probability has a lot of power to it, especially if you can learn how to control the qubits, not just individually, but also. Together. So the ability to have two qubits interact with each other in a way that you control the state between those two qubits

Chris: qubits being the one or the

Mark: zero cubits being the fundamental unit of quantum computing.

Mark: So, okay. A Qubit is a thing that can be a zero or one when it’s measured. Think of it this way. When it’s measured, it’s a bit, it’s a zero or one, but before it’s measured, it’s a cupids which can do things like the superposition. Which is one of the main kind of properties. It can also be entangled. So you can actually have a Qubit that is strongly and mathematically related to the other to another Qubit on, you know, the other side of the computer or on the other side of the planet, quantum mechanics doesn’t really care.

Mark: So. Quantum computing is a very different way of approaching it. That lets you deal with notions and ideas from physics in a way that is computationally advantageous. And that’s really the power of quantum computing. So what are we talking about there? We’re talking about the ability to compute over every possible key in a key space.

Mark: If I have 128 qubits, I can compute over all possible keys and there are certain algorithms that might, and I say might there’s no, we are yet to actually see a 128 bit AEs key, for example, be broken on a quantum computer. We haven’t seen that yet, but the theory says that it can be done and we know how we think we should go about it in a way that, well, we think works and the little toy versions we’ve done, they work.

Mark: So why would you go over the whole key space so that you could extract the key.

Chris: Why haven’t we seen that yet? Is it just the, the cost of that

Mark: process? It’s the cost of the process. It’s also the fact that it’s really bloody hard. Okay. Right. It is a hard problem. So to give you an idea about how you make a Qubit, there’s lots of different ways.

Mark: There’s no universal transistor. So when you saw mic microchips first coming out, you saw a standardization in the way in which we thought about transistors, the way we built transistors and the transistor became the fundamental building block of binary circuits. So the idea of a state of, you know, a solid state controllable switch with qubits, we haven’t got there yet.

Mark: But when you think about how some of the qubits are made, that’s gonna give you a clue as to why it’s hard. So one thing is an ion trap Qubit. And literally what you do is you take a little area about the size of a basketball and closed in metal, and you pump all the air out of this space. So there’s less, there’s more nothingness inside that chamber than there is in outer space.

Mark: Okay. So this is like really empty. You then make it really cold. Okay. How cold, if you’re familiar with degrees, Kelvin, zero being absolute zero, you know, you can never get there, but it’s the coldest temperature, theoretically, you’re talking about one or two degrees Kel at the hottest. Geez. Yeah. So we, we built, we built this and then what you do to have a quantum computer is you take an individual atom, one literals, really just one atom and you suspend it in a little like cup made from radio waves.

Mark: Interesting. And then to control it, you hit it with lasers, like everything in quantum sounds. That’s one thing you can certainly say about quantum computing is that everything’s, I I’ve said space, I’ve said impossible vacuum. I’ve said possibly low temperatures, you know, lasers are involved, radio frequency cups.

Mark: I mean, when was the last time you lifted something with a, with, you know, an antenna, you know, you probably don’t do that every day. Right. But that’s what you do. And if you look at the way that ion Q is one company who make quantum computers that do this continuum or another company that have huge you know, sort of quantum computers, most of which most of the quantum computer is actually the control circuitry.

Mark: Which is something we’ll talk about in a bit, in terms of like the, you know, how do you threat model? What’s the attack surface of a quantum computer? Like, you know, that’s a really interesting question, cuz there’s so much that goes into making qubits, do what we want them to, but to give you a scale of the problem, a Qubit is something is some fundamental unit of physics that is directly manipulated.

Mark: I won’t say controlled because that’s slightly not the right picture. So to keep you so that’s, that’s, that’s why you’ve you, you’ve not seen huge scale quantum computers because just getting 10 atoms to float in 10 individual radio frequency cups. Yeah. A vacuum, you know, empty than outer space. That’s also very, very D extremely difficult to pull off.

Mark: exactly. So, you know, scaling that up and that’s what they’re trying to do now. They’re trying to scale that idea up so that we can have, you know, a hundred atoms floating in space, you know, expertly controlled by, you know, very advanced electronics and control systems, but that’s the kind of challenge you’ve got to, to get over.

Mark: And that’s not even the only kind there are trans one qubits. There are topological, qubits there’s potential for doing quantum computation with photons. So photonic QUTs there’s, there’s a lot of different ways of approaching this problem. None of them seem to be universal enough and reliable enough, which is why none of them has really won out yet.

Mark: I’m sure at some point we’ll get a big development. Someone will work out a really cool engineering thing, which will then be able to say, okay, this is how we. And everyone will probably follow the suit. I imagine, I dunno, I haven’t got a crystal ball. But I think that, that goes some way to explain why we’ve not got quantum computers on our desktops yet.

Chris: Gotcha. No, that makes sense. I’m still processing it, but it makes sense to me. But let’s talk about quickly, you know, our industry and cybersecurity and, and what you just said, you know, I can visualize it, but how does that directly relate to cybersecurity and how can it, in your opinion impact us and, and what we do.

Victoria: I guess the immediate one would be in terms of cryptography. The fact that quantum computers are likely to break RSA public cryptography, which we are, I don’t know most of our lives sort of rely on. That’s probably the most immediate one. Fortunately, these computers aren’t fully operational now, or some suspect they might never be.

Victoria: Although I think that view is sort of diminishing,

Chris: but the potentials there. So it’s, it’s almost like you have to think ahead in terms of that.

Victoria: And it’s certainly, you know, the money of recent years is being put into it that there is that kind of almost like I imagine, you know, the space race in the sixties, it’s something comparable to that.

Chris: So you mentioned breaking RSA, public key cryptography, but would it help on the other side in terms of Strengthening cryptography

Victoria: AB. Absolutely. And that is something that is going on by N they have an open call right now to look at new methods of cryptography. And those are being evaluated.

Victoria: I believe they’re in the third stage with a lot of delays which I from just getting the read on the community right now you know, we were sort of expecting to have new standards published this year. Part of why we were thought quantum village would be perfect for this year was kinda in tandem with that.

Victoria: But I know mark, certainly you’ve got a, a bit of a, more of an insight into what’s being done on the sort of organizational level.

Mark: Yeah. So we’re all anticipating and waiting for N to publish their post quantum cryptography, PQC cipher results. And they’re basically gonna turn around and say, okay, these are the ones that made it through.

Mark: Several years of very deep and careful analysis. Some have fallen off quite graciously, you know, they were analyzed and said, oh, it’s not quite strong enough. It’s not quite good enough. And then others have fallen off quite dramatically. One was called rainbow and you might have seen some news articles that rainbow was broken.

Mark: Meaning that that someone found that you could break the rainbow post quantum cipher with a regular laptop in about a weekend. Geez. Yeah, apparently no one told them it had to be classical, safe as well. So, you know, it’s it, but that’s unfortunate. I think really I don’t think they intended that particular gap, but it turns out there was enough leverage in one of the requirements on rainbow that you could actually you could leverage it to be able to get out and discern parts of the original key.

Mark: So ultimately we are gonna be waiting for N to publish. A lot of people are holding their breath. There’s, there’s been some kind of rumblings around various communities, especially around like risk and compliance, because N haven’t really said much about what’s gonna happen with FIPs the federal information pro processing standard, which is like a bedrock.

Mark: Requirements for any large scale data processing corporation that does anything in America which is basically everyone, you know? So they haven’t said too much about how it’s gonna affect that. So what does the post quantum world really look like? I don’t know entirely. And that’s part of the conversation we want to get rolling.

Mark: Like we’ve got huge organizations who are gonna need at some point to move over to these new cryptographic ciphers, which are so there’s still classical ciphers. There’s still things that run on regular computers, but you’re gonna need to in to install them, to standardize them first, get the code, ready, get it tested, and then push it out to everyone.

Mark: Like literally everyone. That’s. That’s not a straightforward task. If you look at some like of the more interesting interview questions like, oh, how would you move a country from driving on the left, driving on the right, like, oh, that’s, that’s quite difficult, but then you can see that Norway did it in the sixties and you can kind of read how they went about it.

Mark: It’s actually, it’s, it’s a, it is one change that kind of, you know, if you were careful about it, it all worked. But post quantum is just, is a huge thing. You know, all new ciphers, new key lengths, new cipher suites, new cipher modes, new hashing algorithms, everything’s different. And so everything is unfamiliar and that’s the real danger, like people making mistakes because it’s so new, how are we gonna get people trained?

Mark: And how are we gonna get people aware? And that’s where kind of Victoria and I came to the idea of quantum village. Like how can we look at these technologies? Not just post quantum cryptography. It’s not just post quantum village, but obviously a huge thing for security. You know, post cryptography, how can we get the people to understand it, to understand the threats around,

Victoria: make it a bit more friendly and keep fearful.

Victoria: Although, although arguably, we probably are at risk right now with store now, decryptor being probably what’s touted around with the idea that, you know, we are probably will being hated with view someone storing the data. Then DECP a

Victoria: sends like that’s

Victoria: leads more

Chris: dollar amount. Give me a dollar amount on building a quantum computer. Like say an attacker’s gonna build a quantum computer. What’s that gonna run? Oh,

Victoria: I, I, I don’t think at this stage where the attacker would build it, but I’m sure you could probably look up what sort of, some of the specs.

Victoria: Okay. I’ll do cause there are some listed companies or you could, you could, we could probably get some data together. And certainly there’s certainly some resources out there. You can’t

Chris: go to best buy and get what you need to build this computer,

Victoria: but there there’s a lot of sort of, you know, billions and, and sort of floating around.

Victoria: And I think that’s probably where making people more quantum aware and sort of getting buy-in is quite important because I think it, it has become a sort of nation state concern. And, you know, I, you know, just speaking in the west, for instance, like our spending might not, not necessarily be comparable to other countries.

Victoria: So there is that kind of definitely a, a sort of competition going on, I think to see who could get there first But I mean there, I mean, I imagine it’s accelerating year on year. It’s certainly kind of doubling and it’s still relatively small perhaps in relation to other industries though. Yeah, I’d imagine.

Mark: I mean, there’s also, so, I mean, I’m, I think a bit more of an optimist. I think that the way that quantum computing companies have gone is they’ve is so I I’ve heard through a friend that you, you can’t buy them, even though there are companies that make them, you can’t actually buy them. What they wanna do is push it out as a service and you can see why they can control the uptime and the downtime.

Mark: There’s, you know, there’s a service contract with themselves, which makes it a bit more straightforward. So what you really can, what they’re start to look at selling. You know, services, access to content, computers, time on content computers. And the way that they’re doing that is they’re kind of federating it through the cloud providers.

Mark: So Microsoft Azure Google C C I R Q IBM Kiski and Amazon bracket. Or if you’re feeling really, cuz it’s a, so Braque is the notation name so people call it Amazon bracket, but a physicist will very quickly come from behind the curtain and correct you. I think you’ll find it’s barquette.

Mark: Good to know already got snobbery going on. Don’t worry. But like sort of now you can get access to it. And I, I think that’s, that’s, double-edged in a potentially good way because we want to engage people with this technology. And now there are cloud services that are relatively inexpensive to free where you can actually use for real, a quantum computer.

Mark: Right now you could write code, you can run through a, a Python notebook. It’s all in all the interfaces are written in Python APIs. So you could just run a notebook and you can send your circuit off and it’ll be run on a real quantum computer and your results will come back and you can analyze them. So, although on the one hand, you’re exactly right, Victoria, we are not spending as much, and we are falling behind a bit of a skills gap.

Mark: The potential for fixing that I think is.

Victoria: Absolutely. And I mean, with, with cloud, it does make it accessible. I, I imagine you know, a few decades ago, if you were a researcher, you had to be near sort of the latest supercomputer, you know, you couldn’t have that access. And there’s certainly something wonderful in that, but I mean, perhaps for certain researchers not being able to physically get their hands and see what’s really going on behind and see what the secret sources might be slightly frustrating.

Victoria: But you know, there are other aspects I imagine, you know, relying on AWS’s security versus their own, you know, helps kind of lower other costs as well.

Chris: Yeah. So Q a S coming your way soon. Yeah. Already here for something already here. Yeah. so how about, how about you know, the training aspect for, for those that are interested in quantum?

Chris: Is there any. You know, training out there that, that people can take advantage of. Obviously you want to get the quantum village to, to start the conversation. But is there anything that’s. Available right now that you guys recommend.

Victoria: Ooh, there’s lots. I think, I think from our perspective, we will, we will, we do have like a sort of page of links.

Victoria: You know, everyone from IBM to say sandbox AQ, a lot of these companies are providing a lot of good starting courses. I think cuz we are in that era of open learning, which is really fantastic, you know, there’s definitely stuff on course, Sarah, I dunno, mark. You’ve got specific ones to point out.

Victoria: Sure.

Mark: So there’s courses on course, Sarah, you said there’s courses on you to me. Some of those are quite advanced. Some of them are less advanced. Some are more hands on. There’s a really good learning suite from Kiski mm-hmm which has a, I think it’s kiski.com/learn. Which is like a really nice resource really well laid out.

Mark: Yeah, that’s the IBM one. Isn’t it? Yeah, that’s the that’s IBM, sorry. Kiski is IBM’s quantum computing Python library. There’s

Victoria: actually, I think they’ve got something coming out in a couple of weeks. If there’s someone who who’s very keen to do a sort of remote learning if they really want to delve into it.

Mark: Nice. And then on the other side, I mean, at some point someone’s gonna say there’s a really good book. But there is actually a really good book, which is self-contained, as in it contains a good overview of how quantum computers are put together. It covers over the, you know, the building blocks and then how you turn those building blocks into quantum algorithms.

Mark: And then also just because of completeness the, the last section is an entirely about just a, a refresher on the mathematics you need, you actually don’t need much, like if you have quantum information without the, the, the physics, like. The mathematics of quantum information is not higher than high school vectors and matrices and linear algebra.

Mark: Now that might still in, you know, instill fear in a good number of people and that’s fine. But if you wanted to get a, quite a deep dive, there’s a book called quantum computing and applied approach which by Jack Heery, which is I’ve recommended it for a long time. It, it has all of those pieces built in for post quantum cryptography.

Mark: There’s a book of the same name published by Springer. I think that’s Dan Vaneen and company from E Hoen university, which has got everything you want to do to understand the primitives about. the, the post quantum ciphers. So depending on which thrust you’re after, whether you wanna learn how to do program a quantum computer, or whether you want to learn how these post quantum algorithms are gonna be affecting your life and how to understand them better.

Mark: I’d say those two are probably the books I would recommend for people’s libraries.

Victoria: Yeah. If, if anyone wants a lighter one, there is a quantum computing like wired guide, which I sort of chew through at the airport kind of thing by a meat cat. Oh yeah. You know, it’s like a hundred page thing. You can sort of even give it to you a curious relative if you are quite technical as well.

Victoria: Which I think is always, always nice because you can kind of just get a sort of bird’s eye view over the impact and, and the exciting things as well. That’s coming, not just the sort of scary ones, perhaps.

Mark: yeah, that was really well written. And I think he’s done a lot of articles in wired. I think mm-hmm so, oh,

Victoria: nice.

Victoria: Yeah. There’s some, there’s some really good communication sort of tech communication journalists out there that we think hope. Hopefully we can get them to quantum village as well, because we, we definitely I think are trying to ensure that that communication piece is, is, is helped forward.

Chris: Do you guys know of any government initiatives or national initiatives to, to boost funding around quantum computing or to boost these educational and training efforts or, or is it I know, you know, mark, I know you said that this was part of your curriculum.

Chris: Is there any curriculum in, in academia today that focuses on quantum computing?

Mark: so in academia, there’s been courses on quantum computing for quite a while. In fact, my AMA mater university of leads one of the guys who invented, who coveted one of the foundational algorithms. So yeah was actually at Leeds for a while.

Mark: He taught a quantum computing course about 15, 20 years ago. Oh, wow. I mean the, the algorithms that break cryptography like shores algorithm was invented in 1994. Love Grover, invented Grover what now called Grover search in 1996. So we’ve actually had a strong background. It’s a usual story, you know, engineers or computer scientist come along and then there’s some physicists or mathematician in the background going.

Mark: Yeah, here’s the last 50 years on that subject for you. You’re welcome. It’s kind of how they’ve treated in terms of like also more. Or active like courses and initiatives. I can speak from the EU perspective for sure. The UK is building a national quantum computing center, which is got of big mandates for developing and incubating, quantum startups, developing quantum computation, developing an academic understanding, and also fostering education programs.

Mark: I’m not entirely certain quite what that looks like right now. I don’t think they’ve finished building their headquarters yet, but like there’s, there’s a big investment there. Likewise, in the Netherlands you have They have departments or groups that usually end in the word Delta. So they have the, the security Delta for a while, which a few people might have heard of who do a lot of work in cyber security, bridging policy compliance and technical people.

Mark: Well, they’ve just announced or just started the quantum Delta, which has got like 650 million euros over X, many years funding to do almost a similar thing, as I mentioned for the British ones. So they have a, they’re planning on having a Silicon fabrication lab and they’re gonna build quantum computers and again, incubate startups, but push education programs.

Mark: There’s a lot of people who are realizing certainly there, that there is a gap and it, we need to do something to sort of try and close it. I’m not too sure what the American perspective is.

Victoria: I mean, I think, I mean, definitely, you know, America has the national science foundation. I’ve, I’ve done a little research grant with them and, and they are, I think the sort of OG in, in funding, those more kind of blue sky research projects They are doing quite a lot and there are sort of centers popping off.

Victoria: I know there’s, I think in Chicago, there’s quite a sort of burdening quantum startup community there. And certainly I think you are noticing, I think we’ve all got this sort of, I hate this word innovation and you sort of, I don’t know, whenever I flip between the UK and the us, every time I go back, someone’s telling me that, you know, this town or this, I dunno, Git is gonna be the crypto capital or, you know, so I’m, I’m sure in Delaware always that in Delaware we’ve credit cards, right.

Victoria: You know, things have got sort of develop in certain pockets. And what Boulder, Colorado is obviously kind of a big epi Sumter for quantum computing. So there’s a lot, there’s a lot of activity and certainly all the big, you know, universities and labs are definitely getting in all it. I think there, there’s probably going to be an element of not perhaps revealing on what’s going on.

Victoria: But we can definitely pull together some, some stats.

Mark: The NSF did also publish, I think, a document called American leadership in quantum. So there’s definitely a drive outside. Mm-hmm

Chris: very cool. Yeah. We could become Delaware could become like area 52 where Regina’s, you know, classified and then, and then we just unleash it.

Victoria: I, I still, I still quite, I get excited when I sort of drive around like the DC area and it’s like, Pente, I’ve got no idea what these are, but you know, friends will tell me or colleagues will tell me, like, this is really important and secretive.

Chris: So yeah. So yeah, as quantum computing continues to accelerate, you know, I’d love to see.

Chris: The quantum aspect become more prevalent in cyber security curriculums and, and that I don’t see happening right now.

Victoria: I’m, I’m sure there is still grappling with like machine learning threats and things, right? Yes, exactly. So sort of like, let us digest this buzz before we go for the next one. And then you’ll we get some networking guys, like, can we deal with the real problems that are, you know, prevalent today?

Chris: yeah, yeah. You know, I, I think that quantum village may, you know, expose that need and that’s what I’m hoping for.

Victoria: We’re definitely hoping that and, and, and hoping just to kind of make it more familiar, make people more, just aware, you know, you don’t necessarily need to become an expert, but understand the implications and be sort of measured about planning.

Victoria: Certainly, I think for info sec professionals, I’m very curious to see how they react. We were at RSA earlier this month and it was actually quite interesting. People received it quite well. I was sort of expecting you know, maybe it’s cuz you weren’t sort of dishing out, you know, we’re gonna catch 99% of your problems or, you know, you know, kind of outlandish claims that people were sort of, I don’t know anything about this.

Victoria: Tell me about this. Or I feel like I need to know a bit more than I do.

Chris: Yeah. So putting quantum computing within cybersecurity curriculums would just be too soon at

Mark: this point. I think, I think you’re right. In terms of, because the usefulness just isn’t there yet. So quite how we’re going to use quantum computing for things that we definitely know it’s got an advantage for.

Mark: So things like actually quantum. So quantum computers you can think of as incredibly efficient optimizers, even though they take all this energy to be very cold and very empty and all that other stuff, like actually they’re still really efficient at. Finding a minimum in a search space, which correlates to a minimum on a curve that is based on a machine learning problem.

Mark: It’s in the training side. Or if you’re looking at ways of doing optimization across different network problems or traveling salesman, style problems, quantum computers are really good at that. That’s where you can think they’re basically brilliant optimizers first and foremost, they will do other stuff.

Mark: I am sure. But right now most of the theory says that the place we’re gonna start is in optimization. So they have applications in finance, in machine learning in,

Victoria: oh yeah. The fund managers are already in on it. Aren’t they

absolutely

Mark: but very much so. Yeah. But we’ve still not seen a quantum computer that can actually deliver an advantage to a bank or hedge fund that I’ve seen so far, unless they’re keeping it very secret, which wouldn’t surprise me.

Mark: But we, we, we haven’t seen that. And I think until we see that you’re not gonna see the sands course in yeah. Grover’s search. Yeah. Or quantum algorithms.

Victoria: It, it takes a while. I mean, I, I, I was talking to people recently and even people who’ve got, say like a machine learning or AI based security startup, like when you listen to actually what they’re providing their customers, you know, and they’re being quite truthful and very humble.

Victoria: It’s not really perhaps the technical research that they’re experts in, but it’s actually like creating, say a no code solution so that, you know, info sec professionals can, you know, hire more people that can just get in there and solve the problem. They don’t need to be deeply technical. So I think in terms.

Victoria: You know, cybersecurity, there’s still a lot of underlying things that need to be built up before. A lot of, even that kind of research gets onboarded, cuz obviously there’s lots of other technologies and people going, trying to build blockchains in, in corporates going on. And I don’t know whether they’re finding much utility maybe are meet someone at DEFCON this year.

Victoria: They’ll tell

Chris: me how. Yeah, exactly. But,

Victoria: You know, and we’re, we’re all for that. We’re all for that discussion. You know, we’re excited to have people say like you’re out of your mind, but you know, there are, there are things that are coming that sort of use quantum effects, maybe not quantum computers and you know, we, we’ve already got things that have come out of quantum theory for, for instance, such as transistors and MRI and things like that.

Victoria: So a lot of this is very, very plausible.

Mark: I think that more immediately, you will see quantum courses on things like post quantum cryptography, because you’ll have a need for it. You will need the workforce to understand it. So you’ll have a, a requirement for that along with that will come. Things like well, I think a quantum key distribution where you actually use quantum physics to generate encryption keys between two parties.

Mark: That’s a bit of a gnarly subject for me anyway because I haven’t seen anyone producing. So I’ve seen that to Sheba have installed with British telecom, BT, a link between two factories. And they’re very proud they got it working, but that’s not like an enterprise minimum viable product. And quantum key distribution was broadly speaking invented in 1984 Bennet and brassard 1984.

Mark: It’s called BBB 84. Another development of that was ETT in 1991. So E 91, I’ve not seen much since, I mean, there’s also been development since then, but since those proof of concepts, like lab based proof of concepts, there’s not been much by way of developing out a, a minimum viable product that’s suitable for enterprise.

Mark: And after 38 years you might start thinking, does that mean that it’s got major challenges to its viability? And it turns out the answer is like, yes. The mathematics that makes QK do you secure is intrinsically related to the. The fiber or the medium that you use transmit. So make it a cryptography.

Mark: You could do TLS over wifi, over Mo code. If you wanted to, as long as you transmit all the numbers and, you know, do the handshake in some way, the mathematics makes it secure. But if you do quantum key distribution, the thing that you’re sending, the photos or the electrons that you are sending to do the exchange.

Mark: Are intrinsically related to that security. Okay. And actually there’s been nearly over half a dozen attacks on quantum key distribution that don’t have CVEs or CREs. It’s a bit of a, you know, sort of a sticking point for it. But there are attacks that are out there against Q KD and the vendors don’t want you to kind of know about those.

Mark: So it’s kind of shining a light on a very honest view of where things are, you know, we, Q KDS got a lot of promise. I really like it, but I want there to be more. And at the moment there isn’t, so there, you’ve got a very different kind of solution that isn’t just P QC, which may or may not be secure against quantum computers.

Mark: We’re not really certain, you’ve got a very different solution that should work, but it’s really hard. And maybe we could fix it.

Chris: Yeah. I mean, I see quantum village becoming, you know, revolutionary from that perspective and just getting new security minded people thinking of quantum. So yeah, let’s talk about that for a minute.

Chris: Quantum village debuting this summer at DEFCON. Talk to me a little bit about the process that it took for you guys to initiate the village and you know, your path up until this point. Cause we’re at the 11th hour, so y’all are ready to go. I mean, theoretically, you’re ready to go.

Mark: I got back

Victoria: and arms I’m clearly going backwards.

Victoria: no, that, that’s very kind. I mean, I think just in the runout, I mean, both mark and I been going to DEFCON, I don’t think we’ve ever met at DEFCON, but so that’ll be fun. but I think just, you know, from my perspective, Dipping my toe, the water of cybersecurity and getting immersed in that ecosystem. I have always found Def one kind of my favorite conference.

Victoria: I have always found, I think the implications, the ethics around a lot of these things, very curious. And as a designer, you, you know, something, when you, like, I look at things like inclusive design and the implications of when you’re creating these systems, I think we do have. This kind of fortune with quantum computing, unlike others, is that, you know, we’re in a time where we’re quite aware, we’re quite aware of sustainability.

Victoria: You have things like ECG and so on, you know, governance, compliance, all these other things that people are quite mindful of. What are the implications? And with that, it doesn’t, you don’t want it being built with lots of red tape and lots of legislation coming to put out fires. But actually if you get people more aware of it now and having those conversations now, when it comes to building with a lot of people who might come, they might never thought their career’s gonna go into quantum, but it might.

Victoria: And you know, if you, if you have a good security engineer, you know, it might so seed today and maybe in a few. They might find themselves dealing with those very issues, those threats that we talk about that aren’t here today, but that are gonna come. But in terms of applying to get things done, I mean, there is a kind of application process that sort of relatively simple.

Victoria: I dunno, mark. Maybe it’s not I think it was, I think it was straightforward. It sort of, we, we emailed and we didn’t hear back for a few months and it was that’s

Chris: yeah. Was there a lot of validation needed or was it like check mark? You’re good to go

Victoria: in, in. Our application, I will say, because we were looking at doing this, I think in 2020.

Victoria: So during lockdown, I think, you know, even you and I, Chris were chatting like, you know, everyone was there sort of percolating, what can I do? I was very much looking at doing I was working in kind of that nonprofit area within cybersecurity to kind of raise inclusion, those kinds of things. And I was getting like people kind of approaching you for things.

Victoria: I’m like, ah, that’s sort of been done and, you know, there’s no point doing it for the sake of doing it. So we actually spent. A long time kind of chewing through our application, getting our logos, things like that, planning what we, what we, what we would’ve liked to have, you know, experienced for, for other things.

Victoria: I mean, there are some really great other villages as well. So, you know, it’s kind of, we’re very fortunate to have a kind of a, a template, you know, I, I don’t wanna be out there. Sort of came. We’ve got huge amounts of originality, but there’s there was certainly a lot of care that went in.

Chris: Yeah. I I’ll be there.

Chris: I’ll be there for sure. What can attendees expect? Are you guys having, you know, conversational points? Are you going to have any demos set up? Like what, what, what should they

Mark: expect? So there’s a number of things that we’re trying to do and how well they come off. We’ll see but, but like, we are trying to, we’re working with some, some companies who want to help out and are effectively sponsors for the event where we wanna have.

Mark: So we’re going to try and have like the world’s first quantum capture the flag. Yeah. Nice. And, and that’s, that’s something that we’re very excited about. The company doing it with us are also really excited about we’re finalizing things and working out how to do challenges. They’re sort of looking at how they can sort of support it and build it out.

Mark: It’s, it’s really exciting to do something like that, that literally, you know, a room sort of, you know, well, a zoom call for of very smart people are all like so, so what do we what do we do now? That’s as you kind of. Bit refreshing. Yeah. Yeah.

Victoria: It, it’s not, I, I think that’s the fun bit of deaf orders.

Victoria: It’s less sort of scripted. Yeah. As you find with all the other kind of big security conferences, obviously they’re cool ones like BSides as well. But we also we would, we were, I mean, I was sort of desperate. We have to get a quantum computer there. Cause a lot of people haven’t really seen one including myself.

Victoria: And you know, the idea that they’re very beautiful. If you look at the kind of cooling towers, they look like chandelier, but the next best option, which is probably good for a carbon footprint of shifting one of those things is that we will be having access to a quantum computer. So attendees will be able to use one, which I think is probably even better than just staring at something like a sort of old school museum.

Victoria: Like you’re on a school trip and that’s being sort of fleshed out. I D know mark, if we’ve kind of, I know you’re doing some notebooks right now. But with sort of. Testing that

Mark: out. Yeah. So the finalizing, this stack has been a bit of a, so I’ve got ideas for how to do certain things. I’ve written some published, some blogs and some publicly available like notebooks on like Google CoLab, if anyone’s familiar.

Mark: So there were some Python notebooks, which we can put some links somewhere for people to access where I show you how to break Exor encryption with a known plain text attack on a quantum computer. Now yes, people will be screaming at me. You don’t need to do that. And I’m like, no, you don’t, but that’s not the point.

Mark: You choose a very straightforward example that we understand really. That we don’t need to have as an example of how to break encryption because you could, if you have, so the attack is a known plain text attack, and anyone who’s done a little bit of cryptography will know that if you have the plain text and cipher text, you can exhale them together to get the key out.

Mark: That’s part of how Exor is sort of, well, that’s how you break it. If it’s like an X or firmware or that kind of thing, you just try a few things out and you can get the key. So the point of that though, is not to like educate you on how to break this. It’s to show you how to break this very familiar attack in a very unfamiliar setting, which is doing it on a quantum computer.

Mark: So I’ve got some ideas like that that are already ready to go. I’m rewriting them to fit in with the stack that goes with the people who are providing us with the access. So we’re using various libraries, which will all be made very clear by the time we get to the event to construct various workshops.

Mark: We’re also looking at having some kind of interactive, almost like exhibits seminars or sessions, open sessions on like how to build a quantum simulator. Like I’ve actually built a prototype of a badge, which. Might turn into a decom badge. Add-on actually, but it’s an embedded quantum simulator that runs on a RAs PI Pico.

Mark: Wow. No, one’s done. No, one’s done that. The reason is why, why would you do that? And when the, when you say, oh, because de DEFCON no one questions it, right. Like it’s the kind of crazy thing. Like, no, there’s no advantage to doing it, except to be able to say that I am wearing a quantum simulator. Right. And that is DEFCON.

Mark: Cool. I think anyway, so we’re looking at sort of, yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re looking at maybe trying to get that done. So that means I definitely have to get some PCBs made now. But things like that are where we’re sort of moving. And then of course, we’ve got some speakers as well who are sort of coming along including one speaker.

Mark: From who’s recently who’s the lead author on a paper on transitioning enterprise to post quantum cryptography. Nice. Yeah. So like that question that you said, like, how are people gonna deal with this? You know, how are people gonna actually make this work? Or we’ve got a guy who’s published at probably one of the most respectable journals in the world.

Mark: And he’s gonna come say hello, be around and actually interact with the community of over, you know, okay. Here’s how you do it. And no, not everyone at decom is from an enterprise background. They don’t have to be like, it’s an interesting problem, I think anyway. So for us to showcase that and go look, here’s how you solve this kind of problem whilst balancing things like FIPs regulations and GDPR and everything else, depending on where you are which jurisdiction you’re in.

Mark: And these are. I maybe I, I, I enjoy making problems in my life, but I genuinely think that these are interesting questions. And then how are we gonna use quantum computers insecurity once you’ve got enough qubits, can you use those for optimizing blue team problems? We’d see the amount of data coming in from crowd strike, log files, CrowdStrike log files, elastic search instances, vast amounts of data.

Mark: And we have already said, well, a quantum computer is a really good optimizer. So is there, or are there ways of utilizing that power in a way that benefits cybersecurity professionals.

Chris: yeah. And DEFCON is where you’re gonna need to be. You’re gonna have elite hackers that are gonna be able to, you know, share their thoughts with you.

Chris: And then from that, you’re gonna be able to potentially spawn new ideas.

Mark: Well, I mean, I’ve, I’ve got an idea. I’ve actually making the world’s first quantum hackers, because I’ve got some ideas that I’d like to, you know, sort of push forward. So you’re recruiting there as well. well I don’t have a business full disclosure.

Mark: I’m not recruiting people like that. but I

Chris: you’re scouting you’re scouting

Mark: trying to get people to think about like, okay. So like I said, the control machinery for a counter computer is just other computers. Oh, well, hang on. I know how to hack those, but what, what payload would you put onto a, those machine as control machinery as control computers, to be able to. Affect a quantum computer’s outputs for some advantage.

Mark: And all I’m gonna say is like a trailer. All I’m gonna say is I’ve got some ideas. I’d love to discuss them with people at DCOM. There you go.

Chris: Leave them with

Mark: that. I would be a quantum hacker that’s it.

Chris: So, yeah, I can’t wait. I’m really looking forward to it. So let’s see. Where can outside of quantum village, where can listeners to this show, if they can’t make it out to Def con, where can our listeners find you both online as well as information on quantum village online?

Chris: Yeah,

Victoria: there there’s quantum village.org. It’s not very beautiful right now, but over the coming weeks, it will start getting populated as we sort of get things more set in stone. Okay. And I mean, there are a couple of podcasts and other things, I dunno.

Chris: Well, post DEFCON, are you planning on putting any findings or maybe conversations that you have had on that website?

Chris: Is that some somewhere that, you know, we could use as a resource

Victoria: AB? Absolutely. And I think, you know, we, I mean, for us, you know, it’s an annual thing. We’ve already had a lot of interest of, you know, come to this country, come here, come there. You know, there is something quite unique about DEFCON and I think that is special.

Victoria: I, I do believe it’s still being streamed. I think the nice thing about post COVID is a lot of people have kept those things in. So you can still tap into that. But we’ll be definitely doing maybe like some webinars and things. I think we’ve scheduled to do some in the coming weeks. I think it’s just that get getting the time and, and coordinating.

Victoria: That’s always a little challenging.

Mark: So we’re starting to push more stuff out as well. We have a LinkedIn group called quantum village and we have of course have a Twitter handle at quantum under school village. So like we’re trying to get those, kick those into gear, get them busier, get them interested.

Mark: We do have still an open call for participation for people to sort of come. We’ve only keep that open quite a bit just because, you know, we want to. We want to get people really sort of who are infused by this idea of, oh, I want to go and be a quantum hacker now. Like, well, yeah, come and be one, come and learn what’s going on, come and see how it is.

Mark: And like Victoria said, the reaction to people has not been as poo pooed, as it might have been maybe a few years ago. I think some people have waking up to the idea that this is gonna be something we actually don’t know what, so it’s gonna be quite exciting or terrifying

Victoria: and, and, and I think we’ve sort of curated it in a way that it’s everything from, you know, like the people we mentioned in nature, which, you know, for any of your listeners, you know, it’s a very, very good one, cuz it’s very concise, got some, some cool names on it as well, who are very experienced in, in the cybersecurity industry, which I think also helps in alongside academia.

Victoria: So there’s that kind of cross pollination

Chris: Cool. And I saw on the website that you had a you had a call for participation. When does that expire? Is that running up into a certain date? Or can, can folks still reach out via the website and, and be able to be involved with this?

Victoria: Absolutely. And, you know, even if they don’t make this year, there’s always next year.

Victoria: But I, I I’d hasted to add to the better just to make our lives a bit easier. Cause we, you know, really do want to fit in things that we think would be important to include.

Chris: Awesome. So when you’re not immersed with the quantum computing realm, where’s the best bar to go to and Victoria, you go to you go to Def con, so it could be in Vegas.

Chris: oh gosh. When you put Vegas up against Delaware, I don’t know if you’re gonna go the Delaware route, but you can. And then mark, where wherever you’re dwelling, it could be Paris. It could be Vegas wherever you, I mean, where’s the best bar that you’ve been to? Well, there,

Victoria: there is a Paris in Vegas. Isn’t there, you know, he could be there right

Chris: now.

Chris: That’s true. That’s true.

Mark: I never stipulated. He never stipulated. That’s true.

Victoria: Okay, well, God, you know, I’ve been taken to some very strange places in DEFCON, which is, is not gonna sound good. Cause I think there’s always these kinda, I think isn’t there like a other conference called like con or something.

Victoria: I, I can’t even keep up or like off strip, you know, a lot of, a lot of the guys will kind of organize houses and things and I sort of have to it’s

Chris: like the BSides B side boy. I

Victoria: know fortunately I’ve always had good friends or colleagues who are sort of you also being foreign, you know, but I will actually say I will go for, for Delaware, the Tristate area.

Victoria: Okay. Just cuz like I’m probably more seasoned there and I will go for summer, which is called Wesley. And it’s actually, I think in Maryland or Maryland,

Victoria: so far, and I love it. It’s one of my favorite places. They have karaoke or Thursdays. I really recommend it. They have, I think it’s like wings night. You know, when I started going to the us, I didn’t actually eat wings. And I think I might have just about be converted, although I did start using a knife and walk which is probably very embarrassing for people sitting with me, but that that’s, that’s the us ticked off.

Victoria: I can give you more, but I give us one in the UK. Well, I wouldn’t say a bar, my favorite place to sort of go for it for tea actually is a place called the, the Wooley. So joke about going from the, to Westley and back again, but it’s in central London. It was quite near the wait,

Chris: are you saying the same place with a different accent?

Mark: The reason I’m laughing is because for what you described of Wesley’s and from what I know of the Woosley, they sound very, very different.

Victoria: Yeah. I, I, I, I guess I would take, you know, a meeting with a CISO at the Woosley and then we’d. You know, meet all the reverse engineers at Wesley’s, so that would sort of balance it out and

Mark: okay.

Mark: Wow. I, I, I don’t think I can live up to that. What I’m gonna do is go to well, okay. I would go to one of my favorite, like there’s, there’s many pubs. I I’m a pub goer, sorry. It’s in my blood. I’m British. I go to pubs. I will probably go to in London either the city of York, cuz it’s a Sam Smiths pub, which means that, oh, the beer is really cheap.

Mark: And it’s really kind of cute inside. There’s lovely little booth. So you can feel like you are conspirators cuz they’re really narrowly tightly packed in. You can fit four people and that’s it. I, I quite like it there, it’s kind of fun or I would choose somewhere like along the river. So near ha the near Hammersmith bridge, there’s a load of a load of pubs near there.

Mark: It’s near where they sit film one of the scenes in the most recent bond movie. So there’s occasionally people taking photographs as if they were with the characters, which is always kind of cute.

Victoria: Maybe they’re just looking for spies

Mark: or they’re just looking for spies because they made the film about it and that’s of course where they’re going to go.

Mark: But no, I probably go for a drink around there. There’s quite a few pubs around there. The black lion, the blue the, oh, can’t remember the Ship Inn and few others. Yeah. So I, I, I like drinking bio river because. I, I do. I just grew up with it. I I’m from Liverpool. So if you’re if you’re actually looking for bars in my hometown, I go to a bar called bar Sava spot, the French way AC actually a tequila bar.

Mark: Okay. And if you don’t go there sober, please. And if you do get there see if they still do a thing that were made of mine. And I invented called the, so they have flavored tequilas and we invented the fruit salad to make ourselves think we were being healthy. We just, just six shots of flavored tequila.

Mark: Nice, nice. They still have it. I, I don’t know, but I, there was a, a few bar people who I would order that with. I dunno their names. All I know is that they were wonderful people.

Chris: I’ll have to go validate that for you. Please do. And this is in what area again? Specif.

Mark: This is in Liverpool out the way

Victoria: in the United Kingdom.

Victoria: Yes. It’s where the Beatles, I dunno what your audience is like

Chris: in the kingdom. Yeah. Your United Kingdom. Let me, yeah, let me specify that. Yeah.

Mark: It’s where all the music it’s where all the music that your parents listen to yes. I actually didn’t like the Beatles when I was in Liverpool. Which is, you know, absolute, hairy.

Victoria: You’re gonna be allowed back

Mark: in . Yeah, I am because I’ve cause of what I’m about to say, which is, but now I’ve left. I listen to them regularly. There you

Chris: go. Aw, there you go. All right. You’ve redeemed yourself. I hope so. All right. So I just heard last call here. Do you guys have time for one more? Sure.

Chris: Always mark. I’m gonna hit you first, cuz you answered first. Okay. If you opened a cyber security themed bar, what would the name be? And what would your signature drink be called?

Mark: Oh, okay. I would open a bar probably in Maryland because that’s, that seems to be the cool place, this kind of thing. I would open a bar called the entangled state and I would have a drink called the whiskey Qubit, the whiskey

Chris: Qubit.

Chris: I love it. Entangled states. So you get, you get twisted in there essentially is what you’re saying.

Mark: That that’s exactly where I’m going. whiskey

Chris: Qubit. Okay. You can go so many ways with that

Mark: literally. Well and, and you can go the other way and everyone knows about it. But oh yeah.

Chris: well, Marilyn’s only like 10 minutes for me, so I, I should be able to make it home safe.

Chris: That’s a quick Uber ride. all Victoria. What’s up? What you got?

Victoria: Oh gosh. Is it a bar or cocktail? No,

Chris: it’s both. You need a bar name and you need a drink name. Oh

Victoria: gosh. Okay. Well then I’ll just have to be quite obvious and cool it stupid positions. What is it called? Super positions. Secret positions. No super positions.

Mark: Oh,

Victoria: God you need subtitles.

Chris: super positions. Okay.

Victoria: And it would be partly in like quantum village and Vegas. It would also be on top of the Bergheim in Berlin and everyone would be drinking Quantinis which would have tea in it. Cause I quite like drinking tea. Quantis maybe. Cause that’s what they, they drink in Berlin to sort of keep up stay up late and that’ll be about.

Mark: Having worked in Berlin. That sounds like the best thing ever. Yeah. But

Victoria: can you get into the bur home? This might allow you to, yeah, I can very hard.

Chris: Maybe you have to solve like this, this, you got to, you know, decrypt, some quantum algorithm to get in. Like, so when you get in you, you’re dealing with people that know what they’re doing.

Chris: I like making some, make some math problem at the door. I don’t know. Cause you just don’t want anyone walking in. You don’t want someone, you know, that’s coming over from the worldly, walking in. That’s

Mark: terrible. We

Victoria: do

Mark: come to quantum village then we’ll have, we’ll have that’s why super positions. Exactly. Well, well then we’ll have to have a have S and whiskey qubits at QV. Won’t we like . Yes.

Victoria: I, I’m not sure. After you talking about this what’s it quad type tequila drink.

Chris: I don’t think it’s too late to get a bartender at, at quantum village,

Mark: especially we’ll have to the

Chris: Quine or maybe we’ll maybe mark will be back there making, making drinks.

Chris: I don’t know. Or

Mark: maybe I can come do it. I can make drinks. You can come help. .

Chris: All right. Well yeah, thank you both for, for stopping by barcode. I appreciate you both sharing your knowledge and really look forward to seeing you both at DEFCON.

Mark: Absolutely amazing. So likewise, and thank you for having us.

Mark: Absolutely.

Chris: You guys take care.