One of the most difficult obstacles to overcome in the quantum race will be the supply chain, given how diffuse it is, a top White House official said Wednesday.

“Supply chain is one of the biggest challenges in my mind, and really, the challenge with the quantum supply chain is that quantum is not defined by a single hardware platform,” said Brad Blakestad, director of the National Quantum Coordination Office within the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

“If you look at the quantum computing technologies, the quantum sensing technologies, the networking — those are all different,” he said in a webinar hosted by Inside Cybersecurity and USTelecom. “And even within computing, there’s seven different modalities that use completely different components. So we have this not just one monolithic supply chain, but just a bunch of different supply chains that are kind of intertwined in various ways.”

Blakestad made his remarks a little more than a month after President Donald Trump signed two executive orders on quantum computing. He referenced proposed ways to address the supply chain challenge in one of the orders.

“The other major issue or challenge that we face right now is that we’re on the cusp of quantum exploding from a commercialization perspective, but we’re not quite there yet,” he said. “So there’s not the funding, the revenue coming from large-scale quantum companies at this point to really make the supply chain as robust as you would want. So thinking about it from the government perspective, it’s just [that] there are too many places that I would want to bolster and not enough funding to do it.”

Blakestad touted steps to help that along such as the government buying widgets from a company that makes them to certain specifications, or prize challenges.

The quantum supply chain isn’t just diffuse in the United States, an International Institute for Strategic Studies policy paper noted Wednesday. It’s “inherently international: no single country dominates the supply chain, whether specialised materials, cryogenic equipment, hardware, software, fabrication or algorithms,” the authors, Dongyoun Cho and Maria Shagina, wrote.

And a March report from the Center for a New American Security identified strengthening the quantum supply chain as pivotal to the United States seizing the benefits of the technology, citing gaps in the U.S. supply chain and reliance on foreign suppliers such as China and Russia. 

Supply chain wasn’t the only obstacle Blakestad mentioned as looming large.

“The encryption challenge is a real challenge, and we want to make sure that we are aware of when quantum computers will ultimately get to a scale that they start having these sorts of implications and move as quickly as we can,” he said. “So, just by owning the technologies, by owning the workforce, by making the United States the place that people want to come to be on the cutting edge of this technology, I think that kind of addresses both of those issues, and that’s what makes it so critical.”

Another difficulty is measuring progress, Blakestad said: “It’s also very, very hard to benchmark, and to know that you’re actually doing what you’re supposed to, what you are intending to do.”

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Researchers at Louisiana State University have created a room-temperature quantum material made from a thin gold film on glass, patterned with microscopic slits that act like artificial atoms. "We call this robust transport. These quantum states carry information," says physicist Omar Magana-Loaiza. "Our crystal can distinguish them and move them from one point to another in a robust way without requiring cryogenic cooling. That's what opens the door to practical quantum technologies." ScienceAlert reports: Crucial to the new material's room-temperature operation is the way it shifts the focus from electrons and atoms to photons (particles of light). This overcomes the usual atomic-level disruption that heat brings with it. The material is what's known as a plasmonic metacrystal: 'Plasmonic' because the light traveling over it makes ripples of electrons known as plasmons, and 'metacrystal' because it's an artificially created crystal. The tiny slit patterns etched into the material act as artificial atoms (meta-atoms), which dictate how different photon groups pass through (the quantum behavior). "By engineering the distribution of meta-atoms in the plasmonic metacrystal, we can systematically dictate which quantum statistics are allowed to pass through the structure," says physicist Riley Dawkins. "So, our crystal essentially acts as a statistical filter on quantum states." That means as light enters the chip and travels across the gold surface, it's manipulated by the meta-atoms -- and by tweaking the size, shape, and spacing of the slits, different end results can be produced at the quantum level. In practice, this means that certain quantum states of light can be transported with less disruption. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader hackingbear shares a report from TOP500: The 67th edition of the TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers was announced today at the ISC 2026 conference in Hamburg, Germany. LineShine, a previously unlisted system installed in China, debuts at No. 1, displacing El Capitan as the world's most powerful supercomputer as measured by the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark. LineShine achieved 2.198 Exaflop/s on HPL -- about 80 percent of its 2.736 Exaflop/s theoretical peak -- making it the first system on the TOP500 to exceed two exaflops of sustained double-precision performance using CPUs only. Installed at the National Supercomputing Centre in Shenzhen (NSCS) and built by the Shenzhen Cloud Computing Center, the system is based on a custom Chinese processor and the "LingKun" platform: 13.79 million cores across 304-core LX2 processors running at 1.55 GHz, linked by the proprietary LingQi interconnect and running Kylin OS. LineShine draws approximately 42.2 megawatts of power, for an efficiency of 52.07 Gigaflops/Watt. Its debut marks the first time since 2017 that a Chinese system has led the TOP500, and it also takes over the No. 1 position on the HPCG ranking with 22.00 HPCG-Petaflop/s. On the HPL-MxP mixed-precision benchmark, LineShine reached 7.92 Exaflop/s for fourth place, a comparatively modest 3.6x speedup over its HPL score that points to a CPU-only design without dedicated low-precision accelerators. While impressive, "the results may say more about Beijing's desire to show self-sufficiency in computing systems than its standing in the global AI race," reports Reuters. Reuters interviewed tech and policy experts who said that the results "do not mean that China has the world's fastest computer for AI work because of changes in the computing industry in recent years and the methods used to compile the list." The reports notes that LineShine "ranked fourth on a benchmark test designed to simulate computing work that is more similar to AI." Jimmy Goodrich, a senior fellow at the University of California's Institute for Global Conflict and Cooperation, said: "If the hyperscalers submitted their systems, this 'world's fastest' would not crack the top five." Addison Snell, CEO of Intersect360 Research, a firm that focuses on supercomputers, added: "I'm not surprised it's the number one system. What I'm surprised by is that they submitted it and want recognition for it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

President Donald Trump signed two executive orders Monday to accelerate the federal government’s transition to post-quantum encryption and reprioritize government financing to support the domestic quantum computing industry. 

The orders, which CyberScoop first reported on last year, direct the government to throw its weight behind the quantum computing industry. They are part of a broader effort by the Trump administration to put its stamp on the development of another key emerging technology.

In May, the Department of Commerce announced letters of intent for more than $2 billion in federal financing incentives for nine quantum companies under the CHIPS and Science Act. Last year, the administration did something similar with its AI-focused executive orders and action plan that created special federal export programs for AI technology and equipment, directed federal agencies to mobilize federal financing tools to support the industry, and cut or curtail regulations that the administration said may impede domestic growth. 

Ahead of the signing, sources previewed details of those orders to CyberScoop. Per one of those sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss pending administration actions, a “whole of government approach is used to empower research and development into quantum computing, as well as quantum sensing [and other resources].”

They described the Trump administration’s attitude for propping up industry as “don’t let us miss out on prioritizing the feeders for the research or the development of quantum.” 

The second order requires federal civilian networks to adopt quantum-resistant encryption faster than the current 2035 deadline. The new encryption algorithms, vetted by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, will protect against future quantum computer attacks. 

Agencies that miss the new deadline must report to the Office of Management and Budget explaining why. 

On hand for the signing were Department of Energy Undersecretary for Science Darío Gil, Department of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Federal Chief Information Officer Greg Barbaccia, and Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratisos.

Multiple executives from technology companies were also on hand for the order’s signing, complimentary of the government’s efforts in boosting the industry.

“IBM applauds the Administration for taking this important, timely step forward,” said IBM CEO Arvind Krishna in a statement. “Sound policy, sustained investment and public-private partnership are vital to sustaining U.S. quantum leadership and technological resilience. We’re proud to keep building on this foundation — strengthening U.S. competitiveness and bolstering national security as we shape the quantum future together.”

“At Google, we are proud of our sustained breakthroughs in quantum computing and post-quantum cryptography,” said Google President and Chief Investment Officer Ruth Porat. “Quantum computing is a transformational technology that can advance national security, drug discovery, energy solutions and more.”

Update; 6/22/26; 5:20 p.m.: This story was updated after the signing with details about the orders, signing ceremony attendees, and comments from IBM’s Arvind Krishna and Google’s Ruth Porat.

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Apple has released quantum-resistant cryptographic code and the mathematical verification tools it developed to prove the code’s correctness, making them publicly available for independent review and broader use across the industry.

The release includes implementations of two quantum-secure algorithms, ML-KEM and ML-DSA, along with the formal verification libraries and tools Apple created to validate their accuracy. The company also published detailed documentation of its verification methodology, which it describes as achieving the strongest known correctness results for any widely deployed production implementation of these algorithms.

The quantum-secure algorithms are integrated into corecrypto, Apple’s cryptographic library used across its operating systems. The library handles encryption, decryption, hashing, and digital signatures on over 2.5 billion active devices. Apple began deploying quantum-resistant encryption in iMessage in 2024 and has expanded the technology to VPN services and TLS networking protocols.

One of the tools released is the company’s Cryptol-to-Isabelle translator, which converts cryptographic models between formal languages, along with supporting libraries needed to reproduce the results. Formal verification uses mathematical proofs to show that code works correctly for all possible inputs. Apple translated its code into Cryptol, a formal language developed by Galois, then into Isabelle, a proof assistant from the University of Cambridge and The Technical University of Munich, to prove both matched the official standards. Apple has used Isabelle previously to verify hardware cryptographic components.

The verification process uncovered errors that conventional testing would have missed. Researchers found a missing computational step in the ML-DSA code that would have silently broken digital signatures. If this bug had reached production, messages in iMessage may have appeared authenticated when they actually weren’t, leaving users unaware their communications lacked proper security.

Even with these tools, Apple acknowledged that it still depends on conventional cryptographic testing and evaluation is needed for assurance. Formal verification can catch errors that traditional testing simply cannot find. Testing works by trying many scenarios, but with complex cryptographic code, there are too many possible inputs to test exhaustively. Subtle bugs can hide in the gaps between test cases and never trigger a warning. Formal verification, by contrast, uses mathematics to prove correctness across all possible inputs at once.

However, Apple’s team writes that it couldn’t formally verify every single aspect of their code with the tools available, so they combined approaches: formal verification for core mathematical correctness, conventional testing for aspects formal methods couldn’t cover, and careful evaluation of how all the pieces work together. Apple argues this hybrid approach provides the most robust security for critical cryptographic software.

“Based on our work to date, we believe that the strongest assurance possible comes from combining formal verification with conventional methods and critically evaluating the end-to-end results,” the blog post reads.

Furthermore, the blog states that Apple selected ML-KEM and ML-DSA from among several standardized quantum-resistant algorithms because they best matched the company’s requirements for security, performance, and compact parameters. The algorithms address the threat posed by future quantum computers, which could potentially break the encryption methods currently protecting digital communications.

More information can be found on Apple’s corecrypto GitHub page. 

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Beau Bullock // Overview The traditional methodology of a remote attacker who has no preconceptions of a target network used to be fairly static. With organizations moving to “the cloud”, […]

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