Quantum computing security at QCE26 turned to the side doors

This guide follows 33 security talks at IEEE Quantum Week 2026 in Toronto. Most probed the quantum computer itself, and a smaller group priced the move to post-quantum codes. In 1994 Peter Shor showed that a big enough quantum computer could pick the lock on most of the public-key encryption that guards the internet. Three decades later, on the Sunday of IEEE Quantum Week 2026 in Toronto, a workshop on quantum computing security spent the day on the reverse problem. Speaker after speaker treated the quantum computer as the house to be burgled. Few tried the famous lock. Most went in through the side doors, the ordinary electronics and files that keep the qubits running. Shor’s lock is still the first job of the field. Methods such as RSA are safe only because finding the prime factors of a huge number takes ordinary computers far too long, and Shor’s algorithm makes that quick. No machine is close to running it at that scale, but data taken now could be read later. So in 2024 the US standards body NIST published its first post-quantum codes, which run on normal computers and rest on problems thought hard even for quantum machines. The…