The countdown to 'Q-Day' keeps getting closer

[SilverSurfer51]

The countdown to 'Q-Day' started the moment a mathematician published one algorithm in 1994, and the deadline keeps getting closer folks.

Q-Day refers to the hypothetical future date when a quantum computer becomes powerful enough to break the public key encryption protecting most of digital life, and the concept traces directly back to 1994, when mathematician Peter Shor published an algorithm showing that a quantum computer could, in principle, factor large numbers efficiently enough to defeat RSA encryption. Physicist Henry Everitt, who helped organize one of the first workshops on the implications of Shor's algorithm back when quantum computers were still purely theoretical, has watched the field move from an abstract idea to real, working hardware over the following decades, IBM ran Shor's algorithm for the first time in 2001, successfully factoring the number 15

For years the threat felt comfortably distant, since breaking real world encryption was believed to require millions of physical qubits, far beyond anything achievable with current hardware. That picture has been shifting though, recent research has lowered estimates for the resources actually needed. One analysis found Shor's algorithm could run at cryptographically relevant scale with as few as 10,000 to 20,000 reconfigurable neutral atom qubits, and a separate Google Quantum AI study with the Ethereum Foundation and Stanford put the threshold for breaking elliptic curve encryption below 500,000 physical qubits on a superconducting machine, both figures dramatically lower than earlier estimates that ran into the millions

Everitt describes the disruption a working code breaking quantum computer would cause as bringing financial markets and electronic commerce to a grinding halt, since the entire system depends on public key cryptography holding. Governments aren't waiting for certainty before acting, the US National Institute of Standards and Technology finalized its first post quantum encryption standards in 2024, and a June 2026 executive order now requires federal high value systems to adopt post quantum cryptography for key establishment by the end of 2030 and digital signatures by the end of 2031. Google itself set an internal deadline to migrate its own products to quantum resistant encryption by 2029, treating falling resource estimates as a signal to move faster rather than wait and see

Q-Day is coming and it might break the entire internetwww.abc.net.au