Emerging technologies demand innovations in metrology: • Agility – to keep pace with a rapidly changing technical landscape; • Ability – to develop novel, perhaps first-ever, measurement capabilities; • Comparability and interoperability – across vendors, in commercial timeframes; • Accelerated delivery – because formal standards may be obsolete by the time they’re published. The same quantum technologies that have revolutionized metrology, such as Josephson junctions that are used to create the world’s most accurate voltage standards and ion traps that are used in time and frequency standards, also underpin emerging new markets in quantum computing, networking and sensing – and these quantum-based products require entirely new approaches for measurement and characterization. The world’s metrology institutes have been at the forefront of the quantum revolution, being both early developers and adopters of quantum technologies for metrology, and are uniquely poised to spearhead the development of metrology for quantum – those measurements and related standards needed by industry to underpin quantum-based products. The metrology community is positioned to create trust in the emerging quantum economy due to its long history of objectivity, neutrality and international collaboration; anticipating industry’s needs to be ready with rigorous measurement capabilities as technologies evolve; and its having formed institutions such as the CIPM, BIPM and IMEKO to support collaborative efforts. The BIPM hosted a workshop in March 2024 which brought together 149 participants from 43 NMIs and designated institutes (DIs) from 39 economies, along with industry representatives, to discuss how best to leverage the expertise of the worlds national metrology institutes (NMIs) and their designated institutes (DIs) to accelerate the development and adoption of quantum technologies through measurements and standards. The workshop supported coordinated development and sharing of measurement “best practices” in support of future standardization, the mission of a new collaborative initiative referred to as NMI-Q. The NMI-Q organizing committee, comprised of representatives of the NMIs of Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States, are working on a cooperation framework inspired by the successful VAMAS organization, which conducts coordinated pre-standardization work in material science. NMI-Q has initiated early work in quantum photonics, and expects to expand to a breadth of technical areas, such as measurement and characterization to support multiple quantum computing platforms, quantum networking models, and sensing modalities.
Cryptographic evidence systems face fundamental trade-offs between confidentiality (Conf), reliability (Rel), and opposability (Opp), with Conf $\cdot $ Rel $\cdot $ Opp products ranging from 0.27 to 0.57 in deployed systems. The Conditional CRO Trilemma recently established that institutional capacity $\Delta $ fundamentally constrains achievable trade-offs through the bound
Conf⋅Rel⋅Opp≤Δ/λ+O(λ−2) . However, the imminent deployment of post-quantum cryptographic systems raises critical questions: do quantum adversaries and quantum channel effects modify these bounds? This paper presents the Post-Quantum Conditional CRO Trilemma, establishing that both institutional capacity and quantum interpretability loss fundamentally constrain achievable trade-offs. Under explicit assumptions about quantum-aware institutional limits, we prove \begin{equation*} \text {Conf}^{q} \cdot \text {Rel}^{q} \cdot \text {Opp}^{q} \leq \frac {\Delta _{q} + \eta _{q} \cdot H(C)}{\lambda } + \mathcal {O}(\lambda ^{-2}) + \text {negl}(\lambda)\end{equation*} where
Δq quantifies the quantum-aware institutional extraction capacity,
ηq is the quantum interpretability loss coefficient,
H(C) is the contextual entropy, and $\lambda $ is the security parameter. Our main contributions are as follows: 1) a quantum extension of the institutional capacity model with parameters
Δq and
ηq ; 2) complete information-theoretic proofs using Quantum Pinsker’s inequality, the Gentle Measurement Lemma, and quantum Fano bounds; 3) an internal coherence analysis showing that NIST PQC finalists (Dilithium, Kyber, and SPHINCS+) imply
Δq∈[28,67] bits under quantum adversaries, consistent with quantum-aware bounded rationality; and 4) a framework for matching post-quantum protocols to quantum-aware institutional capacity. We demonstrate the internal coherence of our framework against the same deployed systems analyzed in the Conditional CRO work, Helios voting, zk-SNARKs compliance, and ECDSA signatures, showing how quantum effects modify their implied institutional capacities. This trilemma shifts post-quantum protocol design from purely computational security to quantum-constraint-aware engineering, with applications to GDPR-compliant quantum-safe systems and eIDAS quantum readiness.
Quantum computers leverage the incredible and dynamic properties behind quantum physics. In doing so, these computers are able to solve mathematical equations that, as of now, cannot be solved using today’s conventional computers. Realizing the potential that quantum computers represent, banking institutions are beginning to both analyze and apply these computers’ use potential, particularly in increasing the efficiency and speed of complex transactions. Simultaneously, banking institutions must also carefully examine quantum computers’ ability to bolster cybersecurity defenses. In the age of quantum computers, existing defenses will prove inadequate, even to lattice-based cryptography. At the dawn of the quantum age, banking institutions are in a unique position to leverage not only quantum computers’ vast computing power in completing complex transactions, but also to use such computers to counter the threat of quantum cybersecurity threats.