Transcript | Quantum Computing at DEF CON Hacking Conference— with Mark Carney and Victoria Kumaran of Quantum Village

DEF CON is the world’s leading hacking conference, about to have its 31st event in Las Vegas. For the second year in a row, Quantum Village will be helping attendees engage with using quantum technologies and understanding the cybersecurity impacts they’ll have. Find out how you can join our community in this episode of The Post-Quantum World. I’m your host, Konstantinos Karagiannis. I lead Quantum Computing Services at Protiviti, where we’re helping companies prepare for the benefits and threats of this exploding field. I hope you’ll join each episode as we explore the technology and business impacts of this post-quantum era.

Our guests today are the dynamic duo behind DEF CON’s Quantum Village, Mark Carney and Victoria Kumaran. Welcome to the show.

Thank you very much.

Hello.

We’ve all known each other for a little bit — we talk behind the scenes — but now we’ll pretend like we’re all official for the purposes of a podcast. And we had Mark on, of course — listeners might remember he was talking about a paper he wrote on the quantum kill chain a while back. But this episode is a little different. In this episode, we are going to be talking about something that’s coming in a few weeks from when you’re listening to this, assuming you’re downloading it when it first appears. And that is, of course, the DEF CON hacking conference — and, more importantly, for our purposes, the Quantum Village, which is being held there. Before we dig into all that, can you give an intro for each of you?

My name is Mark Carney. I’m not the governor of the Bank of England, formerly, but I was actually formerly a violinist back in the day, and a hacker. I’ve come into technology through the cybersecurity route. I’m currently working on Quantum Village and doing innovation and research at a global bank.

I have to say, for everyone who associates hacking with techno music only, here you go — he was a violinist, Vic.

Hi, I’m Victoria. My background’s in art and design. I went to Saint Martin’s and I’ve been working in a wide range of startups — everything from tech to tonic water, focusing on design, building strong communities, and we’ve been working on Quantum Village two or three years now, and we’re just getting ready for our second iteration this August.

There was a Quantum Village last year at DEF CON, and some listeners might have gone. But some people might have never been to DEF CON in general. I’ve been going there since 1999 at the Alexis Park Hotel, it was a really surreal experience. It was tiny. The rooms were super packed, and now that they’re in big rooms, they’re super packed, so it makes no difference. Do you two want to tag-team and give our listeners a sense of what DEF CON in general is like before we dig into the Quantum Village?

DEF CON is a no-holds-barred, gloves-off approach to the real deal of technology. If you want to find out what’s really going on with a particular tech, DEF CON is a good place to find people who can tell you the true story behind something. And what we wanted to do with Quantum Village was take that approach, but with quantum technologies — not just accepting that “This is going to break it,” but looking under the hood and going, “How’s it going to break it?” “What are the resources required?” “What are the challenges that we have to overcome?” and then helping people lift their quantum literacy because at the moment, not a lot of people in the whole world, by percentage, know a whole lot about quantum technologies, and some of the brightest and most innovative people are at DEF CON. The aim we had was to try and bring that mindset and quantum technology together to see what happens. And the answer is that it’s a lot of fun. There’s a lot of interest.

DEF CON is one of those unique spaces, and Konstantinos, you’ve been around a lot longer than us. You can attest that it’s that no-marketing, gloves-off approach, which is super refreshing for a lot of people. You have commercial conferences — they’re heavily marketed, polished things where you’re bamboozled with lots of things that don’t really make much sense, or you’ve got academic conferences, and DEF CON is a very niche but nice and fairly welcoming space that merges technology and a lot of creativity. It has a lot of time for creativity, and a lot of smart people go.

There is a scary side or image, but it’s a special place, and it allows us to meet everyone, from someone who’s deeply technical, who might have a Ph.D., but they very well might not, but they have a deep interest and curiosity, and that’s usually the crucial bit. And the key thing for Quantum Village is to tap into that and build a bridge because there are a lot of academics we come across, a lot of people in policy and government, who want to understand what’s going on in the hacking mindset. There are certainly example in the world already that are doing that, so we’re echoing some of that as well.         
 

DEF CON was always viewed as a big party too. You have Black Hat, all stuffy with its vendor booths, and then, when it’s over, you go to DEF CON, and everyone’s hanging out by the pool. But then there are these deep tracks with talks that everyone is just dying to see — things that would draw headlines. You would usually get a lot of press after each DEF CON as major vulnerabilities are revealed, tools, and it changed the world little by little every year, and it would grow. And as it grew, we started having the need for what we call villages. There would be these side channels, these side tracks — Wi-Fi was a good example, the wireless idea as that started to become popular. It’s, like, “Let’s have a whole bunch of talks about that,” and a whole bunch of talks about AI and a whole bunch of talks about different topics.

And now it’s exciting that after two years, now we’ll have Quantum Village, a place where we can focus on that kind of technology. It’s not actually a little village off by itself with a campfire or anything — it is a few rooms inside the venue. Is there going to be any theme or anything around Quantum Village this year? Is there anything you’re pushing for?         
 

Our big idea this year is to build on interactivity. One of the most popular villages is the lock-picking village, where you sit down, and someone’s going to give you a lock and lock picks and go, “Here’s how to pick a lock.” And some people are horrified by this idea, but by the end of it, what people have at the end is a better impression of what a secure lock looks like. They’ll go, “I’m going to spend the extra $50 on an Assa Abloy lock because this other one is rubbish. I’m going to throw it out. I’m going to rely on this” because you have a better sense as to why they’re better.

And what we want to do is build more interactivity into what we’re doing. We’re pushing for more workshops. We’re pushing for more ideas with talks — with code, for example — where we can present something where people attend and they sit down, they learn something and they can also do it as well. And that’s our big push this year. It sounds like a cover — “Interactivity!” — but realistically, we’re just trying to get people to engage with this technology — not go, “Quantum is somewhere” but go, “Quantum’s here — it’s on my laptop, and I’m able to do something with it.”         
 

Last year, you had a little device to show people how simple it could be to understand the principles of quantum. Do you just want to talk about that, because that captures that hacker feel.

This was me getting a little bored, and so I decided, what could I put a quantum simulator onto? My background is in embedded security, and I’ve got this thing of, can I put something on an embedded chip? I decided to write a quantum simulator that fits onto a Raspberry Pi Pico, which is a little dual-core, Arm-based processor. I wrote it for four or five qubits — four is qubits is the one that I released through Quantum Village. And people loved it — having that little simulator with a little screen, little buttons that you could interact with and the world’s worst UI imaginable.

But people were captivated because it’s different when it’s on your laptop and it’s IBM — it’s big names, and cloud, and “Oh, wow.” But it’s a little small thing in your hand, and it’s more intimate because you’re the only one interacting with it, so it was crazy to me to think that something I’ve done for fun, like, of a weekend or a few weekends in the run-up, would become a staple. We ended up giving a lot of them away as prizes for the quantum capture the flag competition which we held.

And it was nice to see that people went, “I get it now,” because when you have an operating system with cloud and network connectivity, there are a lot of moving parts. When you can look at the source code for an embedded simulator, you can see very quickly, “Here’s what you’re doing. Here’s how you take a circuit and then turn that into a distribution or even a measurement set.”         
 

You handed one to someone on a plane and had them start messing with it.

We were on the plane to DEF CON, and, of course, everyone else on the plane was going to DEF CON.

It’s a captive audience.

I sat next to a lovely student from the University of Maryland, and I handed it to him because he was asking me those questions, and I was, like, “I’ve got code to write. Can I give you this?”

What was awesome, though, about that was that his first reaction was, “I’m not going to get the quantum stuff.” That’s the nice thing that we discovered last year: Quantum has this hocus pocus thing around it. There are all kinds of things in the world that get called quantum, but you’ve got this physics layer, and it’s intimidating. But these are the sorts of people who, once you interact with them and you give them something hands-on, it’s remarkable how quickly they pick it up. We saw this in our quantum capture the flag last year as well with how people placed, with their experience or their inexperience, which was surprising and validated what we were doing as well.

The true capture the flag — you’re breaking into machines and capturing a flag. There’s a text file or something. We’re going to have to talk in a moment about what quantum capture the flag looked like last year and what it’s going to look like this year.

The idea now is to get people dipping their toe, getting them comfortable, and this year, Mark’s got a few good ideas.

To be clear, we’re not breaking into quantum computers, and we’re not using quantum computers to break into other computers. That’s not what capture the flag is in this context. Before we dig into capture the flag, Victoria, do you want to explain this one? The quantum font. Can you intro the impact that that’s already having, and what it is?

It’s based on the quantum computer model, and we’ve launched it for World Quantum Computing Day. And ultimately, it’s something that instead of using LaTex or some programme like that — that’s fine if you’re immersed in the academic world, but for a lot of other people, it’s quite hard to do the notation. And it was something where we are applying our more holistic skill set and thought, “Let’s just make a font.” You could download this and then have this in Word and just type it out.

We’ve had very good feedback, and that’s part of the ethos we’re trying to foster and demonstrate at Quantum Village, and we’re open to collaborating with people. It’s open source — people can give us edits. We’re really open about it, and it’s about showing what is possible beyond building the quantum computers themselves. And, of course, we also get those fantastic folks in to show us what’s going on.

Are tech publishers interested in this already — the font?

There is one publisher who messaged me via a friend, and they were, like, “We love this because we’ve got 20 editors who are all having to deal with quantum now because it’s growing, and they want to do more materials.” But their editors are struggling to learn LaTex because they’re editors. They’re not academics who are used to that kind of rigmarole. They love the idea, and the fact that you can have it in a Word doc or an email or whatever, because it’s a TrueType font, was really appealing, and we’ve had some amazing feedback from that, so we’re pleased to build on this and see if we can make better versions and help with edits.

Our listeners should download it and take a look. It’s basically quantum Wingdings. If you miss those old days of, before emojis, what did we have? Wingdings. We’ll have quantum emojis, eventually.

But I wanted to highlight it too, because it just shows that Quantum Village isn’t something that lasts for three days. It’s an ongoing community feeling, and putting out things that help people learn. And, of course, while you’re there, you could take advantage of the camaraderie and everything that’s going on. Let’s dig into that — back to capture the flag. What did that look like last year? What was happening? Is there hacking? Not really. Is it quantum Jeopardy? Maybe not exactly that. How would you classify capture the flag?         
 

It was like the world’s most challenging pub quiz. That might not translate to American audiences, necessarily, but we have lots of quizzes, pub quizzes in the U.K., and it was more trying to have a fun approach to solving problems. You could, over five challenges, build a Grover search iteratively, and the idea is that at each stage, once you complete it, there’s a validator server which will then give you flags and give you points therein. The idea is that you can still get flags by making the correct choices for content circuits or by performing the correct actions with well-known libraries such as Qiskit, and there are some circuit challenges as well, and the idea is to build that this confidence in interactivity.         
So although you weren’t actually hacking a quantum computer, you were getting a sense for how quantum technology might work and how you might be able to understand better questions around — last year, we had seen NIST begin its standardisation releases, so it was good to build a a body of knowledge around Grover search and Shor’s algorithm — for example, trying to show people, “Here’s what they look like.”         
We also had fun things like a picture app, which was great because we messed with people. We had one where it was Alexi Kitaev, but to get the points, you had to put the name in Cyrillic because he’s Russian. I had one person beating down near my laptop. He said, “This is the answer. Why is it not right?” I’m just like, “Where’s he from?”         
It was a lot of fun. People were engaged with it. We had submissions for the full 48 hours we ran. At any time of day, there was someone sitting, hacking away at the changes. From that, I can tell you that the greatest number of wrong submissions take place at 1 a.m., so that’s the worst time to do quantum information science and tech, in case everyone’s wondering for the academic output.         
 

Just spend that time at the bar, I suppose, like people tend to do at DEF CON — there’s lots of that. How do you envision it being different this year than last year — the capture the flag?

We want to capture more of what’s actually going on in the tech. What we’re trying to do is build more realistic scenarios around actual quantum computers. A lot of the quantum computer technology stack is classical — the cloud system, the queuing systems, the compilers and optimisers, the measurement equipment. They’re all running Windows or Linux, predominantly, and we do know how to hack a lot of that. And we do know how to take particular issues and iterate them forward into challenges, trying to build technology stacks that then mimic real quantum computers, albeit without the actual quantum piece in the — the very cold, very empty box where the qubits live.

Without that, we’re trying to build a more realistic model so that we can show people, “Here are the kind of things that quantum computers should take into account,” because ultimately, the more we get engagement from large companies, small companies, with quantum tech, the more their regulations are going to follow them.

Our dream is always to have a quantum computer or some sort of kit there to give people a real feel — that’s not in a museum or some prestigious city center. Our focus this year is to get more interactive. Following on with the CTF this year, including more bits about quantum networking and communication. That’s something that we will be covering more. We’ve had the interest of people participating, companies that are starting to do that, which is exciting.         
Last year, it was much more focused on computing. We did have some different things, but this year, we’re hoping to also have access to computers as well. Last year, we had access to lots of quantum circuits. This year, we’re very much looking to build upon that, expand that, get people more comfortable. We also, as part of being more interactive, want to do things around music, having an audiovisual piece, and that way also helps people understand what’s going on and somehow learn in a different way. One of the great things about Quantum Village and the setting of DEF CON is, it’s full of people that learn in a different way. There are things to play around with, things to break. We have had a few companies that have reached out that have said that they are considering it, and I guess you’ll have to find out in August.         
 

It’s not going to be like the room where the talks are and the room where the competition is. You’re hoping to have something more interactive that people could touch and experiment with.

And building out with the quantum simulator. Last year, Mark did a great job with getting the parts — it’s always getting the right parts — but we built it in a way that even people who cannot attend globally, we’ve done it in a way that for $20, $30, you can get this to students or people who are curious and build things remotely, and that’s where we’re trying to connect the dots as well. But also branching out on the audiovisual piece and, obviously, doing the workshops, that’s one thing that is valuable to the community, and we’re trying to build that out and get access to people who aren’t necessarily in the academic labs, because that’s already a finite group.         
When people talk about a quantum talent shortage, it’s more that if you’ve only got these very academic tracks and you’re only looking at that, you’re already closing off your potential. There are some really smart people. If you upskill them now, if you get access to them now, the onboarding the next few years is going to be easier, and it’s much more welcoming. And it’s supposed to be fun. You can do what you want. We’ll have stickers. We’ll have swag. If you want to do draw a quantum toilet, you can do that. Or if you want to showcase your quantum internet thing that you’ve built, do that as well. It’s a very welcoming space, and there’s no such thing as a stupid question.         
 

Quantum toilet — I’m just going to let that one sit there.

Well, we did one of our picture rounds last year, and one of the submissions was Jeff Bezos’s toilet.

They’re sealed, so if we can’t get any real hardware, we’ll just put a black box in the corner and write something with a marker, like, “Look at that!”

Mark built that thing last year, and I believe this year you’re going to put something similar to a very different use.

One of the things I’ve done with it is, I’ve turned it into a quantum music thing. I’m building that out a little bit because my background as a violinist is creeping in, and I’ve already promised at least one professor to send him a quantum guitar pedal, so that’s something I’m actively working on developing. And if people want to come and get involved — like, GitHub has lots of code, and there’s a lot of code that isn’t quite public yet because we want to release it in a way that it’s working and proof of concept, and at least it makes a decent sound, as opposed to just blaring some random noise. We want to be able to tune these things and have a good effect on what we’re doing. There’s a lot of push for that kind of thing, as well as arranging a full performance with these devices.

One of the ideas we have had is to add networking, because the Pi Picos now have a wireless version which now does Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. I’ve got a prototype for some cool networking simulators that might let the badges talk to each other in a way that we can have a performance where everyone’s part of it because everyone’s entangled, which sounds really nice: You are the sound. You are part of this performance. And it lets you play with these ideas in a way that hopefully will stimulate people to think about what’s going on, because a knock-on effect is, if I’m part of this, and I’m having an effect on this performance, what else could be happening if my data goes to it or to a computer, or if I start writing quantum algorithms that then work on particular signals?

We’ve got a real mixed bag of ideas when it comes to things that we have planned. We also are looking for ways of building out better senses for what is going to happen with stages of technology. There are the big questions of, when quantum computer? But that’s only part of the story. You’ve also got to consider, when quantum sensing device? There’s a lot of news recently about position and timing devices being used in various navies and whatnot. It is important to understand that that’s the start. It’s a thin end of a wedge in many ways for quantum sensing coming into our lives. There’s amazing work at the University of Nottingham on these tiny NMR devices. And that could have all sorts of effects when you get to quantum-level sensing. And then you’ve got the quantum internet as well — quantum communications, and how’s that going to work and change things? Will I ever have a QKD chip in my phone that communicates to a satellite?

Maybe it’ll never happen. Maybe it’s too hard, or maybe some whiz kid’s going to come along. The more we expose people to these ideas and the more we get them to think either through workshops or through art and music and just being creative and having fun, different people engage in different ways, and we want to speak to that, to break out of the closed club, and so it becomes a more open platform for people to learn and discover.

So, you’re going to have people potentially creating music together right there.

That’s my hope.

I don’t know if it’ll be good music.

To anyone who’s been in a band, they know that it’s very much like the Copenhagen interpretation: You might be entangled for a while, but you do ultimately collapse. That would be interesting to see.

It’s going to be great fun.

And we’re definitely this year touching more on the policy piece, the privacy piece. We don’t tend to do any panels. I should never say never, but what we’ve been doing is Oxford Union–style debates. And part of that is to foster that healthy discourse and healthy discussion, and we had good results last year. We’ve got people signing up for this year, and that’s something that will be fun and interesting to watch. Even if you can’t attend, we’ll have everything up on YouTube as soon as possible. Some panels tend to be a sort of lovefest of colleagues, and it doesn’t always lead to diverse thinking. It ends up being a bit of an echo chamber, and that’s what we’re trying to break, and provide a space for people to propose other ideas as well, and creatively.

I want a few links from you guys to put in the show notes so folks can get a sense of what this all feels like before they decide to head out there.

Yeah, absolutely. I took part in the debate about post-quantum cryptography, and I took the position of a legacy CISO. This is a guy in charge of security who doesn’t care about quantum: “No — not a problem. Not going to be my thing. Ten years out. OK, I don’t care.” And I was up against Dr. David Joseph, who is very much a PQC person — as am I. I do see the benefit, and we’re now seeing the regulations coming forth, and we’re seeing new standards emerging. But I had to present the opposite argument, and afterwards, I got an e-mail a few months later from when we released the video, and the email was from a Ph.D. student who was looking for people to talk about PQC, and he was struggling to find the opposing side of the argument. He was very surprised to find that I’m actually pro-PQC, you see, because he was so well convinced by my argument against PQC.

Classic debate club, right? Someone’s got to take one side, and someone has to take the other.

That’s really healthy. And some people won’t have an immediate need to change things, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be aware. And you’re always managing your own risks and your own risk profiles and attack surfaces and your own threat model. You have to be aware of what could be changing, and when and how that matters to you. Is it your problem, or is it Microsoft’s problem for providing you with the Windows capability to do that? There are a lot of different moving parts in all of this.

Cryptography is hard — has been hard for a very long time. And now we’re needing to move into a more crypto-agile world where we can move things around that traditionally we haven’t needed to. There’s a lot of different thinking we have to adopt — not just quantum thinking, but also being agile in ways we’ve traditionally not had to. There is a lot for people to learn from the various debates and discourses in the quantum tech and post-quantum cryptographic world.       
 

We’re trying to be more of that neutral space where we don’t have the point of view, or telling people, “This is the way it has to be.” So much is being formed now that it’s more about creating a space where people can come and think about what could be, and learn and find the views that they want to find, and challenge other people’s views and have their own views challenged, because a lot of us have ideas and want people to talk to, to tease out, because we have a lot of good ideas and a lot of bad ideas, and that’s a lot of the same that you get in scientific discoveries, that kind of methodology. It does work very well, but laced with a bit of fun.

It sounds like people are getting a sense of interactive and different types of things they could do there. They’re they’re going to be able to participate. And I want to talk about that, too, before we run out of time. There will be talks. The schedule isn’t up yet, but there will also be a few opportunities to sit down and absorb some practical, intense information. Is there anything you could share yet of those, or is it too soon to reveal?

We have some interesting workshops coming up that we’ve arranged. One is a deep dive into the internals of post-quantum cryptography. We’re also planning one with a dear friend of Quantum Village about some quantum-inspired.

I wonder who that could be.

I couldn’t possibly comment. I think his name is Konstantinos, actually.

We have some other talks and ideas lined up, for example, on the quantum music side. We are also planning a workshop to go with that so that we can lead from “Here’s how you take noise, sound, turn it into signals and do quantum with it,” and then straight into “and here’s a performance of what is possible with a bleeding-edge tech.” That’s a flavor of the kind of things we’re looking at. And as we get more confirmations, we’ll start putting things up on the website.

We’ll also be continuing on quantum life and looking at secondary effects and creating a space where people can partake, and we’re still very much open to people who may want to contribute who are doing things around how technology affects life in different technologies. We tend to find there’s a lot of crossover and overlap. At the same time, having a space where people can discuss themes around privacy and identity and talk about what the benefits could be, or what should be, is quite helpful.

And what could people do, then, to participate? Obviously, they can go to DEF CON and get a badge and spend a lot of time in those rooms, which will eventually be on the schedule. But what else could they do if they wanted to get involved?

The first thing that we’re going to be keeping open until quite late in the day is a call for challenges. The quantum capture the flag is something we want to see what people are thinking about quantum tech and what interesting corners they’ve discovered. Last year, I set a challenge that had quite a few 100 points on it, a big scorer, but it was a very gnarly challenge about writing an algorithm that had a very particular thing, and you had a number-of-lines restrictions, so you had to write it in open QASM with very meager resources. And the idea was to see — I was, like, “Nobody’s going to solve this. This is like one of those pinnacle things to see if anyone gets close.” And three people solved it. And this is a little problem that had a couple of postdoc friends of mine scratching their heads giving an answer. Three people, none of whom had ever done quantum before, managed to solve it.     
And when you look at the tradition of DEF CON capture-the-flag competitions, there’s always someone who just goes, “This is mine.” We’d love to get the other view, like, if someone’s noticed a cool thing or has a good idea for a challenge, we have a call for challenges that is open, and that’s going to be kept open for as long as we can, because it’s very easy to add the challenges. And we’re going to have a hall of fame for people who have submitted. That’s one way we’d like to be able to get involved.     
 

Victoria, do you have any other ideas for how people and companies can get involved?

We try to keep ourselves as available as possible, but in terms of corporate partners, there are a lot of quantum computing companies that we’ve not interacted with. We’ve had the benefit of being able to track people down at other meet-ups and things, but any of them shouldn’t be too afraid to reach out. We’re always looking for support looking at ways to help support volunteers and students who want to continue on projects. We’d love to be in a position to help fund them and have those companies help support that because there’s a lot of good work, a lot of high-quality stuff.

We have started publishing papers. We started helping other government agencies — working with them is that kind of neutral space. With that, beyond Quantum Village this August, we are available, and we’ve got lots more ideas that can help facilitate that interactivity with other communities outside of that very typical corporate and academic field, which is also important, but it’s not the whole bigger picture, and our community is slightly wider and very eager to get more into quantum tech.     
 

DEF CON 31 is August 10–13, 2023. But if you’re listening to this in the future, chances are there’s going to be another DEF CON with the Quantum Village edging up in that second week of August or so. Be on the lookout for them, too. Any last thoughts before we say, “See you in Vegas?”

For some people, they see “hacking,” and it all gets quite scary. But the important thing is, if you don’t start getting involved in doing it, other people will. So, come along. It’s quite friendly.

The biggest thing I learned from last year is that whenever you’re telling yourself you can’t do something, if you say the lie, which is, “I’m not smart enough,” it’s a lie. You are. You could absolutely do something, and Quantum Village is, I hope, a space that we’ve built where you can dip your toe, dip your foot or dive right in and discover what is a fascinating emerging field of technology that is amazing — the things you can say. We’ve made some of the coldest, emptiest vacuum chambers in the universe that we know of, and we’re potentially building them to compute vast numbers and vast optimisation problems.

That’s genuinely exciting — to think that in five or 10 years, that’s going to be something that we’re plugging into an HPC system in a data center. And what the possibilities are — there’s a lot of excitement around this. There are a lot of potential issues as well, and we want people from all backgrounds to come and be part of that conversation. And we’ll obviously help as much as we can to give you the tools to talk and think, and engage with this technology.     
 

That’s really well said. Thank you, you two — Mark, Victoria. I can’t wait to be hanging out with both of you in person. It’s going to be so much fun. And to anyone else who wants to come brave the 116-degree temperatures outside, come on down. The AC does work in these places, though, so you’ll be very comfortable in the desert.

Now, it’s time for Coherence, the quantum executive summary, where I take a moment to highlight some of the business impacts we discussed today in case things got too nerdy at times. Let’s recap. Mark and Victoria are about to host the second Quantum Village at the 31st DEF CON hacking conference. DEF CON has always been known for letting attendees get a deep look under the hood of technology, mostly through talks covering all sorts of exploits.

And, let’s face it, it’s a big hacker party, too. As themed subgroups or villages started forming as part of the show, specific technologies started having their own communities. Past examples included villages where you could learn lock picking or hacking IoT devices. Now, quantum has its hands-on home at DEF CON in the Quantum Village. This year’s unofficial theme is interactivity.

Mark already built a four-qubit simulator device people could interact with last year. Expect to see that device integrated into something new to play with something musical this year, and there’s nothing more interactive than a capture the flag. This year’s contest should have more expanded concepts in the challenges, including quantum networking and communication.

Along with the hands-on activities, technical talks will of course be given in the village. One of them, I’m certain, will be about quantum-inspired approaches, because I’ll be the one giving it.

It’s not too late to join us in Vegas if you hear this as it first posts. DEF CON 31 is August 10–13, 2023, and if you’re listening in the future, we’ll see you at DEF CON 32 and on.

That does it for this episode. Thanks to Mark Carney and Victoria Kumaran for joining us to discuss DEF CON’s Quantum Village. And thank you for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to Protiviti’s The Post-Quantum World, and leave a review to help others find us. Be sure to follow me on all socials @KonstantHacker. You’ll find links there to what we’re doing in Quantum Computing Services at Protiviti. You can also DM me questions or suggestions for what you’d like to hear on the show. For more information on our quantum services, check out Protiviti.com, or follow ProtivitiTech on Twitter and LinkedIn. Until next time, be kind, and stay quantum-curious.