Post-Quantum Cryptography: The Trust Crisis Coming for Every System with David Pollak

About this episode

Viktor Petersson discusses post-quantum cryptography and its implications with guest David Pollak.

In this episode of Nerding Out with Viktor, host Viktor Petersson sits down with David Pollak, founder of Spice Labs and creator of the Lift web framework, to unpack post-quantum cryptography and why the migration window is shorter than most teams realize. Google now estimates elliptic curve encryption could be breakable by quantum computers in 2029, putting the trust layer behind every bank transaction, signed document, software update, and Bitcoin wallet on a fixed timeline. David draws on a career that spans writing software for FEMA at 14, beating Lotus in the NeXT spreadsheet market, diagnosing Twitter's original Fail Whale, and years at Cisco's firewall group. The conversation moves from the mechanics of Shor's algorithm and lattice-based replacements to the harder problem underneath: discovering where cryptography actually lives across millions of microservices, legacy mainframes, and post-build artifacts that no SBOM tool can see. The episode reframes the post-quantum transition as a discovery and prioritization problem before it is a remediation one. Viktor and David cover crypto agility, the hardware root-of-trust gap in TPMs and HSMs, why the forgery threat is bigger…

People in this episode

Host: Viktor Petersson

Guest: David Pollak

Topics covered

• post-quantum cryptography
• trust crisis
• crypto agility
• quantum computers
• software security
• microservices

Keywords

• post-quantum cryptography
• quantum computers
• elliptic curve encryption
• Shor's algorithm
• crypto agility
• trust layer
• software updates
• Bitcoin wallet

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Spice Labs, Cisco, FEMA, Lotus, Twitter, HSMs, TPMs

More episodes of Nerding Out With Viktor

• Rethinking Container Security: Why Isolation Was Never Built In (with Alex Zenla) · April 30, 2026 · 1h 19m
• SBOMs & CRA Compliance with Olle Johansson and Anthony Harrison · March 24, 2026 · 1h 21m
• Biohacking Resilience: Engineering the Human System with Marcelo Garcia · February 11, 2026 · 1h 12m
• CRA Explained: What the Cyber Resilience Act Means for Device Manufacturers · December 17, 2025 · 1h 6m
• UK Online Safety Act: Digital ID and the Risks of a Database State · November 19, 2025 · 1h 6m
• Rethinking Software Security Compliance in the Age of AI with Nick Selby · November 5, 2025 · 57 min