On the face of it, even relatively "point-target" goals of this kind could take many decades if at all; GaN for blue diodes come in mind as an example of a field that was stuck for a generation -- until it wasn't.

I thought it was a typo at first but wikipedia explained:

The Sword of Damocles is an ancient Greek moral anecdote, an allusion to the imminent and ever-present peril faced by those in positions of power.

Shor's algorithm is a quantum algorithm for finding the prime factors of an integer

What is the biggest number factored using Shor's algorithm?

Last time I looked it was very unimpressive.

Edit: It's gotten worse. 21 from 2012. "Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with an 8-bit Home Computer, an Abacus, and a Dog" say the factorization of 35 in 2019 actually failed.

https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1237

So we know that quantum computers hold a real risk of being able to break a lot of encryption. We also know that changing cyphers is hard (because reasons)

But what I don't see is what I can practically do now, as either someone who is a CTO/Big Cheese™ or a lowly engineer?

The problem is that we're not trying to predict the exact future, we're hedging against possible developments. If there's a 50/50 chance of quantum computers being widely deployed for cryptoanalysis, then there's a 50% chance of this migration being useless. But you don't want to bet your security on a coin toss! So, we migrate.

That's the unfortunate truth of security, sometimes the protections are never triggered. But you still need them.

Perfect.

I have been hearing about one more technical hurdle to solve before quantum algorithms become feasible since before I graduated. That was in 1996.

Show the data, the charts, let people decide for themselves.

I'd really like to know what his current work on the subject entails, but when I try googling his stuff all I find are years-old papers, more recent meta discussion, and him making a few comments about other peoples' work.

I was sure that by now he'd have at least collaborated on some avant-garde PQ algo that was as different from the NSA approved stuff as chacha20-poly1305 was from AES. I was hoping for a PQ-NaCl folks would be using soon, not the libpqcrypto that seems to lack traction among devs (for reasons I do not understand). I am disappoint.

(It's probably all tucked away in some corner of the web that a layman like me will never find. Sigh.)

Edit: Hah! I gave up on looking for papers or repos and decided to just read his blog instead. Well would'ya look at that! It's non-stop PQ ranting of the kind we've come to love and cherish from DJB. No new repos or code with his imprimatur that I can see so far but better than I was expecting. Looks like I've got some reading to do....

I should have subscribed to his rss feed years ago. And his "microblog" too! https://microblog.cr.yp.to/

> if quantum computers start breaking cryptography a few years from now, don’t you dare come to this blog and tell me that I failed to warn you. This post is your warning.