Will quantum computers soon be able to crack any encryption?

On a science slam stage, a physicist with a doctorate, known as "Dr. Laser Luisa," uses Harry Potter analogies and childlike drawings of atomic figures to explain how light is stored in gas. At the same moment, intelligence agencies in data centers from Virginia to Frankfurt are extracting petabytes of encrypted communications and stockpiling them. The strategy is called Harvest Now, Decrypt Later – harvesting what is currently unreadable, and decrypting it once the technology is ready.

What this cute stage format presents as a quantum physics wonderland is the nightmare of every classical encryption method. Shor's algorithm, published in 1994, kills RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography in one fell swoop. With that, a secure web is now simply a matter of machine maturity. And that maturity is approaching, faster than the laughter of a Science Slam.

Dr. Laser Luisa and the whole WhatsApp drama
The presentation starts with pictures of cats. No one should have unwanted eyes on the cute tiger cubs, so we encrypt them—so far, so child-friendly. Then comes the sentence that should really be the entire presentation: Quantum computers crack classical encryption much, much faster. Instead of elaborating on this point, Mr. Cesium and Mr. Xenon enter the picture: romantic noble gases with a love field, a magnetic field as a prelude, cesium atoms crashing into walls. The audience laughs because the horrific is transformed into a cute animation in a scientific format. Anyone who still grasps that their bank account will soon be exposed online was paying attention; anyone who simply enjoyed Mr. Cesium missed the actual presentation.

Shor and the Death of RSA Patience
Peter Shor published his algorithm in 1994. On a classical supercomputer, cracking an RSA-2048 encryption would take the estimated age of the universe; with a sufficiently powerful quantum computer, this is reduced to hours. It was precisely this concern that drove the American National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to embark on an eight-year marathon effort. On August 13, 2024, NIST published the first three post-quantum standards. FIPS 203, FIPS 204 and FIPS 205In March 2025, HQC was added. Anyone who considers this academic foresight should ask themselves why the NSA, NCSC, and BSI are calling for immediate migration with such rare unity. Agencies with such different day-to-day operations only agree when something goes seriously wrong.

And digital signatures are going down with it. Software updates, code signatures, TLS certificates, banking authentication – everything that is supposed to prove today that a file or website is what it claims to be will become an identity masquerade from Q-Day onwards.

Harvest Now, Decrypt Later – the open secret
While the audience laughs, the Collective operation For years. The British NCSC openly states it in its annual report: State actors are exfiltrating petabytes of encrypted traffic for analysis in the coming years. Bulk interception of TLS sessions, VPN tunnels, diplomatic cables, financial transfers. Everything that looks like white noise today will become an open book as soon as the machine is operational.

The industry calls this day Q-Day, with predictions ranging from 2026 to 2035. In December 2024, Google broke the below-threshold barrier with Willow – more qubits mean fewer errors, instead of the reverse as before. IBM has set its roadmap for 2029, with a fault-correcting system called Starling, featuring around 200 logical qubits and capable of one hundred million operations. Microsoft is presenting Majorana 1, a system with topological qubits. John Clarke, Michel Devoret, and John Martinis received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2025 for the underlying foundation. Anyone who still considers this wishful thinking has been asleep for the past two years.

Quantum communication comes too late
The solution that Dr. Laser Luisa is promoting is called quantum communication or quantum key distribution, with security guaranteed by the measurement problem inherent in quantum physics itself. It sounds elegant, but there's a small catch: Physically, this currently only works between two points and over a maximum of a few hundred kilometers of fiber optic cable. Global internet traffic doesn't run over point-to-point fiber optics, but rather via routing nodes, mobile networks, and satellites. That's precisely why Luisa is researching atomic quantum storage as a precursor to quantum repeaters, which are intended to eventually solve the range problem. The threat is today; the solution will arrive at the earliest in the future.

The EUdSSR and its migration sleeper car
The NSA is already migrating, as is the US military; the Five Eyes alliance has its roadmaps in place. And in the EUdSSR? The Brussels bureaucracy manages to do it all at once. Chat control To demand measures against one's own population and to park the cryptographic migration in an endless consultation carousel. The BSI (Federal Office for Information Security) preaches recommendations, German banks are testing hybrid solutions, and Swiss telecommunications companies are scratching their heads. While authorities prattle on about phased plans, intelligence agencies are collecting data whose analysis won't be worthwhile for another five to ten years. Anyone sending an encrypted email today containing medical findings, attorney-client privilege, or business documents is banking on the fact that no one will care about the content in five to ten years – a remarkable belief.

Final Variant A
And while Dr. Laser Luisa, amidst applause for diversity, aims to inspire more women to study physics, data centers worldwide are already shoveling the harvest for Q-Day. Anyone who considers the quantum threat science fiction missed the boat in 1994 and will miss out again in 2024! The only options now are to migrate or later discover that your secrets from two days ago will be your morning reading – and this whole thing is called "digital sovereignty"!

Alternative conclusion B (alternative)
While Dr. Laser Luisa, to the applause of diversity advocates, wants to rewire physics in a feminist way, the quantum computer is simultaneously cracking the last lock on every bank account. Anyone still relying on RSA today is trusting an algorithm whose demise NIST declared two years ago! And because Brussels prefers inventing chat surveillance to organizing cryptographic safeguards, the data collectors are reaping even more in the EUdSSR field – and then calling it "European cyber sovereignty"!

Will quantum computers soon be able to read our chats? (Luisa Esguerra Rodriguez – Science Slam)