One day soon, at a research lab near Santa Barbara or Seattle or a secret facility in the Chinese mountains, it will begin: the sudden unlocking of the world’s secrets. Your secrets.
Cybersecurity analysts call this Q-Day—the day someone builds a quantum computer that can crack the most widely used forms of encryption. These math problems have kept humanity’s intimate data safe for decades, but on Q-Day, everything could become vulnerable, for everyone: emails, text messages, anonymous posts, location histories, bitcoin wallets, police reports, hospital records, power stations, the entire global financial system.
“We’re kind of playing Russian roulette,” says Michele Mosca, who coauthored the most recent “Quantum Threat Timeline” report
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