Encryption services are sending the right message to the quantum codebreakers | John Naughton

Quantum computers may still be years away, but it’s prudent that end-to-end encryption providers are ramping up defences

A pressing question, then, is when that moment may arrive. At present, nobody really knows. It’s a bit like nuclear fusion. Quantum evangelists claim that it’s only a few years away. At the high end, some observers think it’s 30-plus years away and there are sceptics who find the whole idea implausible. But then it’s not that long since people thought that large language models were pie in the sky. So it may be prudent not to be too complacent.

That’s certainly the view taken by Signal, one of the providers of the encrypted messaging service that I and many of my colleagues use. “We are not in a position to judge which timeline is most likely,”