Cloudflare Aims for Full Post-Quantum Security by 2029

Cloudflare, a leading provider of internet infrastructure and security services, announced plans to achieve full post-quantum security across its platform by 2029, accelerating its timeline in response to rapid advances in quantum computing. The move, which includes upgrading authentication systems, follows similar commitments from Google and comes amid research indicating that quantum machines could break current encryption standards within the next few years.

The decision stems from recent breakthroughs that have shortened estimates for when cryptographically relevant quantum computers, or CRQCs, might emerge. On March 30, Google Quantum AI published a whitepaper estimating that fewer than 1,200 logical qubits could solve the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem used in Bitcoin's encryption, a 20-fold reduction from prior benchmarks. The same day, Oratomic, a quantum startup, theorized that Shor's algorithm could crack 256-bit elliptic curve cryptography with as few as 10,000 reconfigurable neutral-atom qubits. Days later, researchers from IQM Quantum Computers and Germany's Fraunhofer FOKUS compiled a gate-by-gate version of Shor's algorithm for RSA-2048 encryption,...