Google moves up Q-Day to 2029

🎮 Google moves up Q-Day to 2029

Google has drastically revised its forecasts and now estimates that quantum computers will be able to break modern public-key cryptography as early as 2029, much sooner than previously expected.

Q-Day is a hypothetical date when a quantum computer becomes powerful enough to break widely used public-key encryption algorithms such as RSA and ECC. This would put at risk: 🔵government and military secrets; 🔵financial transactions; 🔵personal data of billions of users; 🔵digital signatures and authentication systems.

📌 Key points from Google's announcement

🛑New deadline: Google aims to prepare for the threat by 2029 and urges the entire industry to move faster as well.

🛑Post-quantum cryptography (PQC): the company is prioritizing migration to quantum-resistant algorithms, including ML-DSA, aligned with NIST standards.

🛑Android 17 will be quantum-resistant: ➖support for ML-DSA will be integrated into the hardware root of trust; ➖developers will be able to generate and store PQC keys in secure device memory; ➖Google Play app signing will transition to postquantum algorithms; ➖enhanced protection for the boot process and remote attestation.

🛑The threat is already relevant: attackers can already collect encrypted data today with the expectation of decrypting it later once quantum capabilities mature.

❓ Why now?

Google has not disclosed the reasons, but experts link this to recent company research. In June 2025, Google engineers demonstrated that breaking a 2048-bit RSA key may require only 1 million "noisy qubits". It's significantly fewer than previously estimated (around 20 million).

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