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Quantum Sundays |80⟩ Quantum Computing and Cybersecurity
What the quantum threat means for your software, your certificates, your firmware, and the AI agents you are about to put into production. A practical guide for enterprise leaders.
TL;DR: Public-key cryptography protects nearly every encrypted connection and signed software package in use today, and a large enough quantum computer would break all of it. No such machine is publicly known to exist as of August 2026, but three developments turned this into scheduled engineering work: NIST finalized FIPS 203, 204, and 205 in August 2024; estimated attack costs for RSA-2048 fell from roughly a billion physical qubits in the early 2010s to under a million in Craig Gidney’s May 2025 paper and under 100,000 in a February 2026 preprint; and Executive Order 14412 set binding US federal deadlines of December 31, 2030 for key establishment and December 31, 2031 for digital signatures. The reason to act before the machine exists is harvest now, decrypt later: adversaries store encrypted traffic today and read it once a quantum computer can break the key exchange, so any data with a confidentiality lifetime past 2030 is already exposed. Deployment trails intent badly, with ISACA finding 5 percent of organizations have a defined quantum strategy…
