Preparing for Q-Day — Jeff Prevost | Ep. 9

What do your bank, the power grid, and your insulin pump share? One day, called Q-Day, could crack them all. In this episode of The Cilantro Diaries, Lorenzo Gomez III sits down with Dr. Jeff Prevost, the Cloud Technology Endowed Professor of Computer Engineering at UT San Antonio and a founder of the Open Cloud Institute, to make sense of the quantum threat almost no one is talking about. Q-Day is the day a quantum computer becomes powerful enough to break the encryption that guards nearly everything online. It could be years away. It could be today. As Jeff explains, it may have already happened, and we would not know. This episode is brought to you by the Open Cloud Institute at UT San Antonio. In this episode we go deep into: • What Q-Day actually is, and why "harvest now, decrypt later" means your data may already be captured and waiting • How Shor's algorithm turns the encryption most of the internet relies on (RSA-2048) into a target • Why the power grid runs on GPS timing, and what happens if that signal goes down • The Internet of Things problem: insulin pumps, cars, even a coffee maker running old encryption in their chips • Why quantum may matter more than AI, and how the two collide • Post-quantum cryptography, NIST's new standards, and quantum key distribution as the defense • The new quantum workforce, from Sandia and Albuquerque to San Antonio's shot at it • Superposition, entanglement, and why Einstein called it "spooky action at a distance" At its core, this is a conversation about a threat we can still get ahead of, and why San Antonio and UT San Antonio are lining up to help lead the answer. If this episode helped you see San Antonio a little differently, subscribe to the channel. It genuinely helps. And if you want to go deeper, join me on Patreon for first look at upcoming guests and to support the show directly:   / lorenzogomeziii   #QDay #QuantumComputing #PostQuantumCryptography #Encryption #Cybersecurity #UTSA #SanAntonio #QuantumTech #TexasQuantum #TheCilantroDiaries #CilantroDiaries #LorenzoGomez #JeffPrevost #OpenCloudInstitute