Futureproofing Blockchain & Cryptocurrencies against Growing Vulnerabilities & Q-Day Threat with Quantum-Safe Ledger Technology (QLT)

With one billion users using 380 exchanges, the security of blockchains and cryptocurrencies remains a major concern as billions are lost to hackers every year. Cryptocurrency hacks negatively impact cryptocurrency markets introducing volatility. Each major scam/hack incident results in a significant price dip for most cryptocurrencies, decelerating the growth of the blockchain economy. Existing blockchain vulnerabilities are further amplified by the impending existential threat from quantum computers. While there’s no reprieve yet from the scam/hack prone blockchain economy, quantum resilience is being aggressively pursued by post quantum cryptography (PQC) researchers, despite 80 of 82 candidate PQCs failing. As PQC has no role in combating inherent vulnerabilities, securing over 1000 existing blockchains against scammers/hackers remains a top priority for this industry. This research proposes a novel Quantum-safe Ledger Technology (QLT) framework that not only secures DLTs/cryptocurrencies and exchanges from current vulnerabilities but protects them from the impending Q-day threats from future quantum computers. As blockchain-agnostic technology, the QLT framework can be easily adapted to secure any blockchain or crypto exchange.

From Standard Policy-Based Zero Trust to Absolute Zero Trust (AZT): A Quantum Leap to Q-Day Security

Cybercrime is projected to cost a whopping $23.8 Trillion by 2027. This is essentially because there’s no computer network that’s not vulnerable. Fool-proof cybersecurity of personal data in a connected computer is considered practically impossible. The advent of quantum computers (QC) will worsen cybersecurity. QC will be a boon for data-intensive industries by drastically reducing the computing time from years to minutes. But QC will render our current cryptography vulnerable to quantum attacks, breaking nearly all modern cryptographic systems. Before QCs with sufficient qubits arrive, we must be ready with quantum-safe strategies to protect our ICT infrastructures. Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is being aggressively pursued worldwide as a defence from the potential Q-day threat. NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), in a rigorous process, tested 82 PQC schemes, 80 of which failed after the final round in 2022. Recently the remaining two PQCs were also cracked by a Swedish and a French team of cryptographers, placing NIST’s PQC standardization process in serious jeopardy. With all the NIST-evaluated PQCs failing, there’s an urgent need to explore alternate strategies. Although cybersecurity heavily relies on cryptography, recent evidence indicates that it can indeed transcend beyond encryption using Zero Vulnerability Computing (ZVC) technology. ZVC is an encryption-agnostic absolute zero trust (AZT) approach that can potentially render computers quantum resistant by banning all third-party permissions, a root cause of most vulnerabilities. Unachievable in legacy systems, AZT is pursued by an experienced consortium of European partners to build compact, solid-state devices that are robust, resilient, energy-efficient, and with zero attack surface, rendering them resistant to malware and future Q-Day threats.