Thankfully, powerful enough quantum computers to break cryptography are likely a ways off.

This timeline could be ten, 50, or 400 years into the future. Yet for some information, maintaining confidentiality decades into the future is imperative. A Social Security number lasts a lifetime. Business intellectual property could be relevant for decades to come. Governments want confidential information to remain confidential. Information that safely transits the Internet today could be watched, stored, and kept for the future. Therefore, securing ourselves against quantum computers is not a problem for the future but for the present. To varying degrees, work is being done today. But is it fast enough?

On the cutting edge of technology, it is hard to tell. The breakthrough will certainly be at the places where money and research are being poured in. In 2019, a joint Google/NASA venture claiming “quantum supremacy” was published in Nature. It claimed that their 53-qubit quantum processor could solve a problem in 200 seconds that would take today’s supercomputers 10,000 years.