27 Jul Y2Q Will Be Here Sooner Than You Think
Countdown to Q-Day at Y2Q.org
– From the Editors at Cybercrime Magazine
Sausalito, Calif. – Oct. 9, 2024
“Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that Y2Q (aka Q-Day) will arrive on or around Jan. 1, 2031,” says Steve Morgan, editor-in-chief at Cybercrime Magazine. “When it does, the world will either suffer unimaginable financial, security, and technological catastrophes that taken together will be an order of magnitude worse than cybercrime, which is estimated to cost the world $10.5 trillion USD annually by 2025 – OR the world will be a much safer place,” adds Morgan, who appeared as himself in VICE TV’s “Dark Side of the ’90s” documentary “Y2K: Paranoia Will Destroy Ya” about the real-life thriller that is known as the Y2K scare. “It all depends on WHO possesses the quantum computer that will break public key cryptography.”
“I believe that quantum supremacy, for certain valuable problems, will arrive around 2030, with Y2Q, or Q-Day, following a year or two after,” says Marin Ivezic, who has spent the past decade helping governments and organizations prepare for the quantum computing era, with a focus on quantum security and post-quantum cryptography.
“If the proper measures are taken, including developing and controlling quantum technologies, this pivotal moment could also lead to greater global security,” says Theresa Payton, former CIO at The White House. “The future depends on who gains access to quantum computing first and how it’s regulated.”
Y2Q.ORG COUNTDOWN CLOCK
January 1, 2031
Payton believes that America is losing the quantum race with China. “And that means everything we know about cybersecurity — every lock secured by current encryption methods — could get blown wide open,” she wrote in an Opinion piece published by Newsweek in May 2022. “Our choice is a simple one: to await the devastation of the first cyberattack fueled by quantum decryption, or to build the defenses to stop it.”
“I have always thought the notion of a ‘quantum apocalypse’ is overstated,” says Bruce Schneier, an internationally renowned security technologist, and author of more than a dozen books including the seminal “Applied Cryptography,” published in 1996, and the recent New York Times bestseller “A Hacker’s Mind.” In a 2018 essay on his site, Schneier wrote that quantum computing doesn’t spell the end of the world for cryptography, and if some inconceivable alien technology can break all of cryptography, then we still can have secrecy based on information theory — albeit with significant loss of capability. Not everyone agrees.
“What has been startling is how quickly the Y2Q deadline has moved from ‘20 years out’ to an imminent, foreboding ‘Within the next five years,’” says Nicole Perlroth, author of the New York Times bestseller “This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends.” “It reminds me of the answer I used to get from government officials and cybersecurity professionals every time I would ask them: How far out are we from a cataclysmic cyberattack with physical implications? ‘18 to 24 months’ — just close enough to add urgency, but far enough away that I wouldn’t hold them to their answer if they were off,” adds Perlroth, who spent a decade as a cybersecurity reporter at The New York Times. “I do not know how far off Y2Q is, but I am intimately aware of how much data has been hacked, stolen, and harvested by America’s chief cyber adversaries — namely China — and fear the day that it all becomes widely available to Shor’s algorithm. I would say that whenever that day is, we would be wise to invest in novel, quantum-safe cryptographic protocols right now and will pay a costly price if we don’t.”
Cybercrime Radio: Is America Losing The Quantum Race With China?
Former White House CIO Theresa Payton
“Evidence says yes (Y2Q will arrive one day),” says Taher Elgamal, an Egyptian-American cryptographer and entrepreneur known widely as the “Father of SSL (Secure Sockets Layer),” an Internet security protocol that encrypts data to keep it safe. ”In my opinion (Y2Q will arrive) after 2030,” adds Elgamal, a partner at Evolution Equity Partners, an international venture capital firm. “But if you remember, we knew when Y2K was going to arrive so we started preparing much earlier. In the mid 2030s is my prediction — but no one really knows at all. The question is when should we start to prepare knowing that adversaries will gain knowledge about current communications then!”
“For decades, the industry has continually predicted that quantum supremacy was just a few years away, but the timeline kept shifting,” says Ivezic. “Recent breakthroughs in logical qubits and quantum algorithms have significantly changed the outlook. It appears we are finally transitioning from the Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ) era to the Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing (FTQC) era. Many of the key scientific challenges have now been addressed, allowing some of us to shift our focus from solving foundational issues to scaling up these recent breakthroughs into larger, more robust systems, which will lead us to Cryptanalytically Relevant Quantum Computers (CRQC).”
“It’s definitely not too early to be planning for it (Y2Q), and it’s good NIST has been doing just that,” says Jim Bidzos, founder, chairman of the board, and CEO at Verisign. “Scientific breakthroughs are notoriously difficult to forecast,” adds Bidzos, founder of the RSA Conference, and former chairman and CEO at RSA Security.
Y2Q.org is a community initiative with facts, figures, predictions, statistics, and submissions published in Cybercrime Magazine, co-moderated by Marin Ivezic. We provide expert opinion on Y2Q, the quantum threat, and quantum security. Our sources are computer, cybersecurity, cryptography, encryption, quantum, and technology thought leaders globally.
For more resources on quantum computing, Cybercrime Magazine recommends PostQuantum.com, SecureQuantum.com, and AppliedQuantum.com.
