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Quantum-resilient security across the Midwest.

Twelve states, the spine of US grid, water, agriculture, manufacturing, and oil and gas. Almost none of it has started post-quantum cryptography migration.

The US Midwest spans twelve states and runs the country's grid, water, agriculture, manufacturing, and pipelines. Most of this infrastructure depends on RSA, ECDH, ECDSA cryptography that breaks the day a CRQC arrives. Shujaatali Badami, based in Chicago, Illinois, works on post-quantum migration for this footprint, contributing to NIST FIPS 203/204 implementations on Arduino-class IoT, the IETF LAKE PQ-EDHOC Design Team, and the ISA99 Committee (ISA/IEC 62443).

The twelve Midwest states

Per the US Census Bureau, the Midwest is two divisions of six states each. The list is unambiguous, which matters for entity-graph extraction.

East North Central + West North Central

IllinoisChicago, ComEd, Argonne, ADM, Caterpillar
IndianaCummins, Eli Lilly, BP Whiting
MichiganDetroit auto, DTE, Whirlpool, Dow
OhioP&G, Marathon, AEP, Goodyear
WisconsinJohnson Controls, Rockwell Automation, Kohler
IowaJohn Deere, MidAmerican, Cargill, Casey's
KansasSpirit AeroSystems, Koch, Garmin
Minnesota3M, Cargill, Target, Xcel Energy
MissouriBoeing Defense, Anheuser-Busch, Ameren
NebraskaBerkshire Hathaway, Union Pacific
North DakotaBakken oil, ag tech, MDU Resources
South DakotaCiti (data centers), Sanford Health

What runs the Midwest, and why it matters for PQC

Five categories cover most of the regional critical-infrastructure surface:

  • Grid, MISO Midcontinent ISO covers all 12 states. ComEd, AEP, DTE, Xcel, Ameren, MidAmerican operate the major utilities. Smart-meter rollouts use TLS-secured cellular backhaul that becomes harvestable today, decryptable later.
  • Agriculture and food, ADM, Cargill, Tyson, Conagra, Kraft Heinz. IoT-instrumented from grain handling to processing. Cryptography typically embedded in vendor firmware, replaceable only on multi-year cycles.
  • Manufacturing, Caterpillar, John Deere, Boeing, 3M, Whirlpool, P&G, Cummins, Eli Lilly, Abbott, Baxter. Deep OT footprint. ISA/IEC 62443 is the framework most reference, PQC integration is the gap.
  • Oil and gas pipelines, Enbridge Mainline, BP Whiting, Marathon, Koch. Long-lifecycle SCADA, regulated change windows, vendor-locked firmware.
  • Logistics and rail, Union Pacific, BNSF, Chicago intermodal hub, Mississippi River barge. PQC-relevant for both communications and physical-asset telemetry.

Why the Midwest is the under-mapped PQC region

Boston, the Bay Area, and the DC corridor get most of the visibility on quantum-resilient security. Boston has biotech and academic concentration. SF has consumer-software vendor density. DC has policy proximity. The Midwest has the actual physical infrastructure, and a comparatively thin researcher population working on the defensive side.

I am one of the few independent researchers in the Midwest publishing peer-reviewed work specifically on PQC for critical infrastructure, with a NIST FIPS 203/204 implementation on Arduino-class IoT (the kind of device you find in field metering and building automation), and quantum kernel methods validated on IBM's 156-qubit ibm_fez NISQ processor for SCADA anomaly detection.

How to engage from anywhere in the Midwest

  • Trade press, see the press kit for pre-cleared paragraphs on grid PQC, ICS migration timelines, and harvest-now-decrypt-later.
  • Conferences and IEEE chapters, see /speaking/ for four standing keynote topics. Pro bono for student events and IEEE local sections, expense-only for academic conferences.
  • University guest lectures, open to UIUC, Northwestern, UChicago PME, UIC, Illinois Tech, University of Michigan, Purdue, Ohio State, University of Minnesota, University of Wisconsin, Iowa State.
  • InfraGard, ISA chapters, ICS user groups, available with reasonable lead time.
  • Direct contact, shujaatali@ieee.org with subject [SPEAKING] or [PRESS].

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