up:: For Press
The primary documents behind every claim
Every factual claim in this resource traces to a document below. Each row names the issuer, the date, and what that document actually establishes, so a claim can be checked against the original rather than against a summary of it.
Where a document is a draft, that’s stated. Where a figure inside it carries the issuer’s own uncertainty language, that’s stated too.
The short version:
- The U.S. schedule comes from 4 instruments, and their dates sit years apart from each other.
- The most-quoted date, 2035, comes from the softest document, a policy goal with “as is feasible” written into the sentence.
- The retirement schedule is still a draft, so its years are stated intent rather than settled rule.
- Seven countries or blocs have published their own timelines, and they differ on strategy as well as on dates.
- The mathematics rests on 1 paper from 1994, and the hardware estimates on 2 papers 6 years apart.
- The precedent record is documentary, drawn from court opinions, regulator settlements, and incident investigations rather than from analysis.
Which documents set the United States schedule?
| Document | Issuer, date | What it establishes |
|---|---|---|
| National Security Memorandum 10 | The White House, May 4, 2022 | The whole-of-government goal of mitigating quantum risk “as is feasible” by 2035. The hedge is in the operative sentence, which is why this is the softest of the 4. bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov |
| Memorandum M-23-02 | Office of Management and Budget, November 18, 2022 | Requires federal civilian agencies to submit a prioritized, algorithm-level cryptographic inventory annually, first due May 2023, and reaches contractor-operated systems. whitehouse.gov |
| Report on Post-Quantum Cryptography | Office of Management and Budget, July 2024 | The $7.1 billion in 2024 dollars estimate to migrate priority federal civilian systems 2025 to 2035, excluding national security systems. OMB labels it an initial projection carrying “a high, but expected, level of uncertainty.” bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov |
| Executive Order 14412 | The White House, June 22, 2026 | Federal civilian High Value Assets and high impact systems migrated for key establishment by December 31, 2030, and for digital signatures by December 31, 2031. The scope qualifier is load-bearing: §4(b)(ii) and §4(b)(iii) reach HVAs and high impact systems, not every federal civilian system. whitehouse.gov |
| CNSA 2.0 and its FAQ | National Security Agency, September 2022, FAQ updated December 2024 | Post-quantum required in all new national security system acquisitions from January 1, 2027, exclusive for software signing and networking gear by 2030, and web, cloud, and operating systems by 2033. Keeps AES-256 in place. nsa.gov · FAQ |
| NIST IR 8547 | NIST, initial public draft, November 2024 | The retirement schedule: 112-bit RSA and elliptic-curve deprecated after 2030, all classical public-key disallowed after 2035. A draft, so the years are NIST’s stated intent. csrc.nist.gov |
| Quantum-Readiness joint factsheet | CISA, NSA, and NIST, August 21, 2023 | The government’s own statement that attackers “could be targeting data today that would still require protection in the future… using a catch now, break later or harvest now, decrypt later operation.” Also the source of the inventory-first sequence. cisa.gov · factsheet PDF |
| NSPM-12 | The White House, June 12, 2026 | Rewrites cybersecurity governance for national security systems, rescinding NSD-42 (1990) and NSM-8 (2022), and naming CNSSP 15 as the commercial cryptographic standard for those systems. Contains no explicit mention of post-quantum cryptography and sets no migration date. whitehouse.gov |
| Executive Order 13526 | The White House, December 29, 2009 | Classification horizons of 25 years, extendable to 50 and 75 for defined categories. The document that puts today’s classified traffic inside its own exposure window. archives.gov |
Which documents are the standards themselves?
| Document | Issuer, date | What it establishes |
|---|---|---|
| FIPS 203, 204, and 205 | NIST, August 13, 2024 | The first 3 finalized post-quantum standards: ML-KEM for key establishment, ML-DSA and SLH-DSA for signatures. This is the date that ends “the standards aren’t ready.” nist.gov |
| HQC selection | NIST, March 2025 | A fifth algorithm selected as a backup key-establishment mechanism built on different mathematics from ML-KEM. nist.gov |
| NISTIR 8105 | NIST, April 2016 | The authority for what survives: Grover’s algorithm “does not render cryptographic technologies obsolete,” and “doubling the key size will be sufficient to preserve security.” csrc.nist.gov |
| SP 800-63B | NIST | The federal digital identity guidance behind password practice, including the treatment of stored password verifiers. pages.nist.gov |
Which documents set the international schedules?
| Document | Issuer, date | What it establishes |
|---|---|---|
| Cyber Resilience Act, Reg (EU) 2024/2847 | European Union | Binds any manufacturer worldwide placing a connected product on the EU market. Reporting obligations from September 11, 2026, full obligations from December 11, 2027. Names no algorithm and sets no post-quantum date. eur-lex.europa.eu · Commission summary, including the 15 million euro or 2.5% turnover penalty ceiling |
| Coordinated Implementation Roadmap | European Commission, June 2025 | Where the EU’s actual post-quantum dates live: start by end of 2026, high-risk use cases by end of 2030, complete by end of 2035. A recommendation to member states. digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu |
| Timelines for migration to PQC | UK NCSC, March 20, 2025 | Discovery and plan by 2028, highest-priority migrations by 2031, all systems by 2035. Advisory, and used by UK buyers as a vendor expectation. ncsc.gov.uk |
| Guidelines for cryptography, Information Security Manual | Australian Signals Directorate | The most aggressive national schedule: traditional public-key cryptography out by the end of 2030, 5 years ahead of most peers. cyber.gov.au |
| Implementation of Quantum Safe Ecosystem in India | Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, February 4, 2026 | India’s national roadmap. Critical infrastructure: foundations by 2027, high-priority migration by 2028, full adoption by 2029. Enterprises: 2028, 2030, 2033. Mandates vendor CBOM submissions from FY 2027-28 and prohibits new classical-only deployments. dst.gov.in |
| ITSM.40.001 | Canadian Centre for Cyber Security, June 23, 2025 | Departmental plans by April 2026, high-priority systems by end of 2031, remainder by end of 2035. cyber.gc.ca |
| Technical Guideline TR-02102-1 | German BSI, version 2026-01 | Germany’s position: hybrid deployment for long-term confidentiality, and the most conservative classical sizing of the major authorities. bsi.bund.de |
| ANSSI views on the PQC transition | French ANSSI | France’s position: hybrid-first as a standing rule with no security regression, applied to signatures as well as key establishment, with a certification gate from 2027. cyber.gouv.fr |
Which papers underpin the technical claims?
| Paper | Author, date | What it establishes |
|---|---|---|
| Polynomial-Time Algorithms for Prime Factorization and Discrete Logarithms on a Quantum Computer | Peter W. Shor, presented 1994, journal version SIAM J. Computing 26(5), 1997 | The single paper the entire subject rests on. Never overturned. arxiv.org |
| How to factor 2048 bit RSA integers in 8 hours using 20 million noisy qubits | Craig Gidney and Martin Ekerå, Quantum 5, 433, 2021 | The 2019 resource estimate, and the earlier of the 2 numbers in the widely cited collapse. arxiv.org |
| How to factor 2048 bit RSA integers with less than a million noisy qubits | Craig Gidney, 2025 | The revised estimate, roughly a 20-fold reduction in 6 years. Both papers together are the strongest available evidence on hardware trajectory. arxiv.org |
| Quantum Resource Estimates for Computing Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithms | Roetteler, Naehrig, Svore, and Lauter, ASIACRYPT 2017 | Why elliptic-curve cryptography falls to a smaller machine than RSA, which runs against most people’s intuition. arxiv.org |
| Quantum Threat Timeline Report | Michele Mosca and Marco Piani, Global Risk Institute | The expert survey behind every probability range quoted in this field: 28% to 49% within 10 years, 51% to 70% within 15, from 26 specialists. globalriskinstitute.org |
| How Quantum Computers Fail | Gil Kalai, June 2011 | The most credible standing argument that a fault-tolerant quantum computer may never be built. The strongest version of the skeptic case. arxiv.org |
| Identity inference of genomic data using long-range familial searches | Erlich, Shor, Pe’er, and Carmi, Science 362(6415), November 2018 | The ~60% familial-match finding: a genealogy-database search for a person of European descent in the U.S. already returns a third cousin or closer. science.org |
| Operationalising Post-Quantum TLS | Balaji et al., 2026 | An analysis of Nginx TLS configurations published to public GitHub repositories, finding 28.9% specifying an RSA key exchange with no forward secrecy. Read the qualifiers before quoting it: the corpus is 8,443 configuration files rather than a scan of live servers, the paper doesn’t state which subset the 28.9% is drawn from, 42.6% of its TLS-enabled contexts use non-production hostnames, and the authors include a commercial post-quantum vendor and the bank that funded the study and hosted its deployment. arxiv.org |
| Quantum computers and the Bitcoin blockchain | Barmes and Bosch, Deloitte | The ~4 million BTC, roughly 25% of supply, sitting in addresses with exposed public keys. deloitte.com |
Which documents make up the precedent record?
Every historical parallel in this resource is drawn from an investigation, a court record, or a regulator’s own account rather than from commentary.
| Document | Issuer, date | What it establishes |
|---|---|---|
| Venona historical release | National Security Agency | Cables intercepted from 1943 and stored unreadable, read from around 1946 onward, with the project running until 1980. The documented precedent for collecting now and decrypting later. nsa.gov |
| APT1: Exposing One of China’s Cyber Espionage Units | Mandiant, February 19, 2013 | Intellectual property taken from at least 141 organizations across 20 industries, hundreds of terabytes, when each intrusion still had to be worked by hand. services.google.com |
| Black Tulip: the DigiNotar investigation | Fox-IT, 2012 | At least 531 fraudulent certificates, and interception affecting roughly 300,000 Iranian users. What a forged trust anchor does in practice, with no quantum computer involved. enisa.europa.eu |
| Equifax settlement announcement | Federal Trade Commission, July 22, 2019 | 147 million people exposed, at least $575 million in settlement. The clearest case of the loss landing on people who were never customers. ftc.gov |
| Merck & Co. v. ACE American Insurance | N.J. Superior Court, Appellate Division, opinion approved for publication May 1, 2023 | A war-and-hostile-action exclusion held not to reach a cyberattack on a non-military company. The roughly $1.4 billion claim settled in January 2024. njcourts.gov · settlement report |
| Travelers v. International Control Services | C.D. Ill., rescinded by stipulated judgment August 26, 2022 | A cyber policy voided over a security attestation the insured couldn’t substantiate. insurancejournal.com |
| Market Bulletin Y5381 | Lloyd’s of London, August 16, 2022 | State-backed cyber-attack exclusions required in the Lloyd’s market from March 31, 2023. lloyds.com |
| 23andMe settlement and consumer alerts | Texas Attorney General; California Attorney General | 6.9 million people exposed from 14,000 compromised accounts, a state consumer alert dated March 21, 2025, bankruptcy days later, and the company later sued as “Chrome Holding Co., formerly known as 23andMe.” Texas AG · California AG alert · California AG suit |
| Y2K spending report | U.S. Senate Special Committee, S. Prt. 106-42 | The ~8.5 billion was federal. The anchor for every Y2K comparison. govinfo.gov |
Which documents are argument rather than record?
Three sources that carry weight in this debate and are analysis, projection, or a record of what people said, rather than findings of fact. Each is worth citing, and each needs its nature stated alongside it.
| Document | Author, date | What it is, and what to attach to it |
|---|---|---|
| ”The Coming Quantum National Security Crisis” | Anne Neuberger, Foreign Affairs, June 2026 | The highest-profile recent policy essay on the subject, by a former U.S. Deputy National Security Adviser (2021 to 2025). It argues China and Russia are already collecting encrypted data to decrypt later. That harvesting claim is made on the article’s own account and is uncorroborated, which is how it was characterized when discussed at Quantum USA 2026. Cite it as a named argument by a former senior official rather than as an established finding. foreignaffairs.com |
| ”Quantum Computing On Track to Create Up to $850 Billion of Economic Value By 2040” | Boston Consulting Group, July 18, 2024 | The source of the 850 billion economic-value figure, sustaining a projected 170 billion market for hardware and software providers. A consultancy projection to 2040, so attribute it and label it a forecast. bcg.com |
| The Report: Quantum USA 2026 | Forum Global, Washington D.C., June 18, 2026 | A record of what was said at a named conference, with named attribution and commercial interests carried inline. Useful for attributable positions from NIST, industry, and vendors. Its publisher states plainly that third-party figures, projections, intelligence-community characterizations, and vendor claims belong to the sources who advanced them and are not findings. Treat every number inside it as a claim by its named speaker. |
The pattern across all 3: they’re citable and they’re arguments. A projection restated as a measurement, or a vendor’s Q-Day estimate restated as a consensus timeline, is the most common way an otherwise careful piece goes wrong. See What gets reported wrong.
Which documents cover deployment and market reality?
| Document | Issuer | What it establishes |
|---|---|---|
| PQXDH specification | Signal, 2023 | The first major consumer deployment of post-quantum protection. signal.org |
| iMessage with PQ3 | Apple, February 2024 | Post-quantum protection deployed to iMessage. security.apple.com |
| A new path for Kyber on the web | Google, September 2024 | Post-quantum key exchange in Chrome and Edge. security.googleblog.com |
| Firefox 135 release notes | Mozilla, February 2025 | Post-quantum key exchange in Firefox. mozilla.org |
| Post-quantum adoption dashboard | Cloudflare Radar | Live measurement of how much internet traffic uses post-quantum key exchange. A moving figure, so cite the dashboard rather than pinning a percentage. radar.cloudflare.com |
| Facts and Figures 2025 | International Telecommunication Union | 6 billion people online, about 74% of the world’s population. itu.int |
| Report on the Cybersecurity Insurance Market | NAIC, 2025 report on 2024 data | U.S. cyber direct written premium of roughly $9.14 billion in 2024, down about 7%, its first annual contraction. naic.org |
| Minimum Elements For a Software Bill of Materials | NTIA, July 12, 2021 | The U.S. definition of a software bill of materials, the mechanism that makes vendor-supplied cryptography checkable. ntia.gov |
| Shared Responsibility Model | AWS | Where the cloud provider’s responsibility ends and the customer’s begins, including data encryption and key management. aws.amazon.com |
| Cybersecurity in Medical Devices | U.S. Food and Drug Administration | Premarket cybersecurity expectations for medical devices. fda.gov |
| Genomic Data Privacy | National Human Genome Research Institute | The federal position on genomic privacy. genome.gov |
| Retention rules | 45 CFR § 164.316; 17 CFR § 240.17a-4 | The health and securities record-retention periods that set data confidentiality lifetimes by law. 45 CFR 164.316 · 17 CFR 240.17a-4 |
| Finding the Right Loan | Freddie Mac | Nearly 90% of U.S. homebuyers hold a 30-year mortgage, which is one document set that stays live for 3 decades. myhome.freddiemac.com |
Questions people ask
Which single document should I read first? The CISA, NSA, and NIST joint factsheet from August 2023. It’s short, it’s signed by 3 agencies, and it contains the government’s own statement of the harvesting concern.
Which numbers here are drafts or estimates rather than settled facts? Three: the NIST IR 8547 retirement years sit in an initial public draft, the OMB $7.1 billion carries OMB’s own uncertainty language, and the Global Risk Institute probabilities are an expert survey rather than a measurement.
Which figures change over time? Post-quantum adoption across internet traffic moves continuously, so the Cloudflare dashboard should be cited rather than a pinned percentage. Hardware qubit records also move, which is why the resource estimates matter more than any machine’s specification.
Are any of these behind a paywall? The Science paper on familial matching is the main one. Every government document, court opinion, standard, and arXiv paper listed here is freely accessible.
Why does the 1994 date appear alongside a 1997 citation? Shor presented the algorithm in 1994, and the peer-reviewed journal version appeared in SIAM Journal on Computing in 1997. Both dates are correct for different things.
Is anything important missing from this list? Two categories, deliberately. Vendor white papers and market-forecast reports are excluded, because commercial interest sits behind the numbers. And no classified or non-public material is cited anywhere in this resource.
How current is this? Each page in this resource carries its own last-verified date in the byline, and the schedules move as drafts finalize.
Where to go next
- Every figure and where it comes from is the same material sorted by number rather than by document.
- Corrections and verification is how to report an error or verify a claim before publishing.
- What gets reported wrong covers the recurring errors and the accurate version of each.
- A glossary of the terms you will meet defines the vocabulary.
- For Press is the full index.
Last verified 2026-07-30 · Maintained by Addie LaMarr, LaMarr Labs.