Recap: What Came Out of the Quantum-Safe Cryptography Roundtable
Q-Day timelines, the migration deadlines that already exist, and what the first movers learned.
On 16 June we ran the first large corporate peer group in Austria on quantum security, at the hub in Vienna. Around the table: innovation leads and CISOs, from companies with projects already running through to those just starting to look.
Andreas Neuhold and Rupert Ursin gave the input. Practical insight came from live quantum projects at Erste Group and at ORF and ORS.
The session ran under Chatham House rule, which is what made it work. What follows is the substance, without attribution.
The threat has a timeline, and it is not the one people assume
Q-Day, the point at which quantum computers can break the encryption in use today, is not expected before 2028 at the earliest. The realistic range discussed in the room was 2030 to 2033.
That sounds comfortable until you put the migration next to it. Moving an organisation's cryptography takes five to ten years. Run those two numbers against each other and the comfortable gap disappears.
There is also a threat that does not wait for Q-Day at all. Attackers are collecting encrypted data today in order to decrypt it later, an approach usually called harvest now, decrypt later. Any data that still needs to be confidential in 2033 is already exposed.
The deadlines already exist
This was the part that surprised several people in the room. Quantum-safe migration is not a topic that is waiting for regulation. The dates are already set out, driven by NIST in the United States and by EU guidance.
- An inventory of your own cryptography by the end of 2026
- Critical infrastructure quantum-safe by 2030
- All systems by 2035
The first of those is fourteen months away at the time of writing, and it is the one most organisations have not started.
The standard is hybrid
There are two approaches, and the answer is not to choose between them.
PQC, post-quantum cryptography, is new quantum-resistant encryption implemented in software. It works everywhere, it is what most of your estate will use, and it is where the standards work has landed.
QKD, quantum key distribution, exchanges keys using individual photons in a way that makes interception detectable. It is hardware-based, it needs physical infrastructure, and it makes sense for a small number of particularly critical connections.
The consensus was that the practical target is a combination of the two, with PQC as the broad answer and QKD reserved for the links that justify the cost.
Worth noting that QKD is not theoretical in Austria. Pilot deployments already run at Erste Group, at A1, and in the Austrian parliament.
What the first movers said
The most useful part of the afternoon was the practical experience, and it clustered around five points.
It needs a decision from the top. Cryptographic migration crosses every system in the company. Without a decision at board level it becomes a series of departmental projects that never converge.
Name one accountable person. Every organisation that had made progress had a single named owner. Every organisation that had not, did not.
Do the inventory before you buy anything. The instinct is to procure a solution. The people who had done this said the inventory is where the real work is, and that you cannot scope the solution until you know what you have. Most organisations do not know where all their cryptography lives.
Do not underestimate the effort. Consistently, the estimates made at the start of these projects turned out to be low. Embedded systems, third-party dependencies and legacy applications are where the time goes.
Use every hardware refresh. The cheapest path is to buy quantum-safe capable equipment at the point where you were replacing it anyway. That only works if the requirement is in your procurement standards, which is a change you can make this quarter.
What to do with this if you were not there
If you take one action from this, make it the inventory. It is the prerequisite for everything else, the deadline is closest, and it does not need a budget approval to start.
If you want the deeper version, bring your topic to the Quantum Ideation Days on 25 and 26 November, where the format is built around turning a question like this into a concrete project.
The Quantum Reality Check is the joint programme of weXelerate and the FFG, free of charge for participants. Roundtables are curated and kept small, and registration is an expression of interest rather than a booking.
Full programme at quantum.wexelerate.com, or write to ecosystem@wexelerate.com.
