When will it break Public Key cryptography?

James Ringold opens by asking the audience to guess when a cryptographically relevant quantum computer might arrive. He frames the risk around public-key schemes such as RSA and Diffie-Hellman, which protect most network communication used since early TLS. Shor's algorithm is the mechanism that would make them vulnerable, while symmetric AES is far more resistant.

The middle of the talk compares current hardware with the estimated requirement. The largest machine mentioned has roughly 56 qubits, while breaking RSA is estimated to need on the order of a million or more error-corrected qubits. Ringold cites a 2035 projection from the Cloud Security Alliance and notes that migration could take around a decade, given how widely cryptography is embedded in IoT devices, legacy systems and certificate authorities.

To close, he highlights "harvest now, decrypt later" collection of network traffic as a near-term concern and suggests modeling where traffic travels. Because NIST had not finalized its post-quantum standards at the time, he recommends testing candidate algorithms in non-production environments and isolating legacy devices where upgrades are hard. Audience questions covered key sizes, blockchain signing and embedded systems.