Samuel Sabogal Pardo

THE QUANTUM DEADLINE

Every secret has an expiration date

A cryptographically relevant quantum computer will break RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography — the mathematics protecting nearly everything online today. Adversaries are already stockpiling encrypted traffic to decrypt later. This is harvest now, decrypt later — and it means the migration deadline is not Q-Day. It already passed.

NIST deadline — classical public-key crypto deprecated

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Per NIST IR 8547: RSA-2048 and ECC at 112-bit strength become deprecated by 2030.

NIST deadline — classical public-key crypto disallowed

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By 2035, RSA and ECDSA are fully disallowed for U.S. federal systems — and the world follows NIST.

🕳️

Harvest now, decrypt later

Encrypted data intercepted today — medical records, state secrets, financial history — will be retroactively broken the day a large quantum computer exists. Long-lived secrets are already at risk.

🔑

The standards exist

In August 2024, NIST finalized ML-KEM, ML-DSA and SLH-DSA — the first post-quantum standards. The tools are ready. What most organizations lack is a map of where their cryptography lives.

🛰️

I measure the migration

At CYTE we built the Quantum-Safe Observatory — a live scanner tracking how ready the internet's infrastructure really is for the post-quantum transition.

SIGNALS OF THE FUTURE

The breakthroughs are accelerating

Each of these looked impossible a decade before it happened. Notice the spacing between them shrinking.

1994

Shor's algorithm

Peter Shor proves a quantum computer could factor large numbers efficiently — a theoretical death sentence for RSA, written 30 years before the hardware to execute it.

2019

Quantum supremacy

Google's Sycamore performs in minutes a sampling task estimated to take a classical supercomputer millennia. The debate over the exact numbers misses the point: the era of quantum advantage begins.

2020

AlphaFold cracks protein folding

DeepMind solves a 50-year grand challenge of biology. In 2024 it earns a Nobel Prize — the first awarded for a discovery made by an AI system. Biology becomes a computational science.

2022

AI goes mainstream

Large language models jump from research papers into daily life. Within two years, frontier models reason through mathematics, write production code and operate as autonomous agents.

2024

Post-quantum standards + error correction

NIST publishes the first post-quantum encryption standards. Months later, Google's Willow chip demonstrates error rates that fall as qubits scale — the key threshold for fault tolerance, once thought decades away.

2025

The race to fault tolerance

Microsoft unveils topological qubits with Majorana 1; IBM publishes a concrete roadmap to large-scale fault-tolerant machines before 2030. Quantum computing shifts from "if" to "when" — and "when" keeps moving closer.

20??

Q-Day

The day a cryptographically relevant quantum computer runs Shor's algorithm against real keys. Nobody knows the date. Everybody will remember it.

BEYOND THE HORIZON

What if mortality is just
an unsolved engineering problem?

The same exponential curves rewriting cryptography are converging on biology. Treat aging not as destiny but as a disease — with causes, mechanisms, and eventually, treatments. These are the three engines that could get us there.

01

AI as the scientist

AlphaFold mapped 200 million protein structures — every protein known to science — in months. AI systems now design drug candidates, simulate cell behavior and generate hypotheses faster than any lab can test them. The bottleneck of discovery is dissolving.

02

Quantum as the microscope

Chemistry is quantum mechanics, and classical computers simulate it terribly. Fault-tolerant quantum computers will model molecular interactions exactly — turning drug design from trial-and-error into computation. The first killer app of quantum computing may be medicine, not code-breaking.

03

Nanotech as the surgeon

Molecular machines that patrol the bloodstream, repair DNA damage and clear senescent cells — today it's targeted drug delivery and CRISPR; tomorrow it's programmable matter operating at the scale where aging actually happens.

"The first person to live to 150 may have already been born. The interesting question is not whether these technologies converge — it's whether our security, our ethics and our institutions will be ready when they do."
— The reason I work on all three.

ABOUT

A decade at the edge of
innovation and defense

A Fulbright and RSA scholar and Carnegie Mellon University alumnus, Samuel has led high-impact projects across the US, Europe and Latin America — from developing cryptographic systems for banks to designing secure AI infrastructures.

He is Vice President at CYTE, a leading cryptography firm in Latin America. His academic journey includes advanced studies in Artificial Intelligence at Columbia University and deep learning certifications from deeplearning.ai.

With over a decade blending theory and practice, he has taught cryptography and secure software development to professionals, regulators and engineers. Whether building secure systems or breaking them to strengthen resilience — where logic never sleeps and security never fails.

Cryptography & PQC Post-quantum migration, cryptographic inventories, protocol design

Artificial Intelligence Secure AI infrastructure, ML research, AI-driven security

Offensive Security Ethical hacking, red teaming, breaking systems to harden them

WRITING & TALKS

Selected publications

ES

Will AI Eclipse Our Own Human Intelligence?

CONTACT

Let's build something
quantum-safe

CYTE LATAM

✉ ventas@cyte.co

📍 Calle 24 # 7-43, Bogotá, Colombia

CYTE EMEA