FINAL WORD
Post-Quantum Cryptography: The status quo and need for action
As advances in Quantum Computing accelerate, organisations are under growing pressure to rethink long-term security strategies and prepare for a post-quantum world. Bas Westerbaan, Principal Research Engineer, Cloudflare, tells us why the transition to Post-Quantum Cryptography must start now and how businesses can prioritise key exchange and digital signatures ahead of Q-Day.
The rapid progress in Quantum Computing is reshaping long-term security planning. While today’ s quantum computers cannot yet break widely used cryptographic algorithms, their future potential creates an urgent need to transition to Post-Quantum Cryptography( PQC).
Data intercepted today could be decrypted later in a‘ harvest now, decrypt later’ scenario once a powerful quantum computer becomes available – a moment often referred to as Q-Day.
The Path to Q-Day: Hardware and Software Progress
Two developments influence the arrival of Q-Day: advancements in quantum hardware and improvements in the algorithms that run on these machines.
Hardware Progress
Every year brings new quantum processors boasting higher qubit counts. But qubits are fragile, and noise limits their reliability. Silicon-based quantum computers are fast and scalable, but extremely noisy – requiring millions of qubits with error correction to break RSA-2048. Ion-trap systems are quieter but harder to scale; even hundreds of thousands of qubits could threaten RSA-2048.
Scalability remains a challenge, but Google’ s Willow project – announced in late 2024 – demonstrated the first scalable implementation of a logical qubit using surface code, a major milestone. Google continues to advance superconducting qubits, while Microsoft explores topological qubits, a theoretically much more stable but not yet proven architecture. Other emerging approaches include neutral atoms and ion traps. Still, software optimisations have accelerated the threat more dramatically than hardware.
Software Breakthroughs
In 2025, Craig Gidney’ s work showed that breaking RSA-2048 requires fewer than one million superconducting qubits – down from earlier estimates of 20 million – bringing Q-Day about seven years closer, assuming a Moore’ s law of qubit counts doubling every one-and-half years. Further optimisations are expected, but RSA-2048 will likely require at least a quarter million superconductig qubits.
Occasionally, new dramatic algorithmic claims surface. In 2024, a proposed quantum
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