Google is dramatically shortening its final preparations for the arrival of Q-Day, the point at which existing quantum computers can crack decades of secret-protecting public-key cryptographic algorithms owned by militaries, banks, governments and nearly every individual on Earth.
a post Published on Wednesday, Google said it has until 2029 to prepare for this event. The post further warned that the rest of the world should follow suit by adopting PQC algorithms, short for post-quantum cryptography, to augment or replace elliptic curves and RSA, both of which would break.
The end is near
“As pioneers in both quantum and PQC, it’s our responsibility to lead by example and share an ambitious timeline,” said Heather Adkins, Google’s vice president of security engineering, and Sophie Schmieg, senior cryptography engineer. “In doing so, we hope to provide the clarity and urgency needed to accelerate digital transitions not only for Google, but across the industry.”
Estimates of when Q Day will arrive have varied widely since the mid-1990s, when mathematician Peter Shore first showed that a sufficiently powerful quantum computer could process integers in polynomial time faster than classical computers. This alerted the world that the RSA’s days were limited. Later research showed that quantum computers provided similar speed in solving the discrete log problem supporting elliptic curves.
The timeline for this arrival is based on when existing quantum computers will contain the required number of qubits capable of correcting the inevitable errors. In 2012, most estimates were that a 2,048-bit RSA key could be broken by a quantum computer with a billion physical qubits. By 2019, the estimate was reduced to 20 million physical qubits. A running joke among researchers was that Q Day had occurred 20 years out of the last 30 years.
