Nigel Edwards

Cryptographic algorithms are based on hard mathematical problems and the security depends on the hardness of those mathematical problems so that you can execute a function to encrypt or sign something and actually reversing that without the correct keys becomes very hard.

Recovering the keys is mathematically intractable.

And though there are algorithms which in theory could recover the keys and break the cryptography,

they would take too long to run on the most powerful supercomputer we have available today.

I mean, what are we talking about?

Millions or billions of years.

So a couple of things I think have caught my eye over the last 12 months or so.

So my colleagues who are researching quantum computing, together with their colleagues in the Quantum Scaling Alliance, published a white paper on how to build a quantum supercomputer.

So they're working with companies, some of the top academic institutions as well, outlining how you would go about producing a quantum computer built of quantum processing units

And then secondly, just recently, a significant white paper was published by a couple of the US government research labs, the National Energy Research and Scientific Computing Center, or NERSC, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, published a survey of the academic literature on quantum computing.

And what they've seen is that

There's a constant trend of the amount of resources required to apply to quantum algorithms being reduced.

And also they looked at what the claims are being made by the vendors of quantum computing devices.

Some of them are claiming that over the next 10 years, there will be a 1 billion factor of improvement.

If anything, there's an acceleration of progress that's occurred over the last 12 months.

The three key dates that we had 12 months ago, looking at the recommendations from various government agencies around the world.

Or have your plans in place by 2028.

And then for your high priority systems, complete the migration by January the 1st, 2031.

And then all migrations by January the 1st, 2035.

2035 is now looking maybe a little bit too late in my view.