A computer just did in five minutes what would take the fastest supercomputer ten septillion years. When one of these finally picks the internet's locks, someone will already be holding a copy of your secrets — waiting.

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In December 2024, Google switched on a thumbnail-sized chip called Willow and asked it to do one fiendishly hard sum. Willow finished in under five minutes. The same problem, handed to the fastest supercomputer on Earth, would take an estimated ten septillion years — that’s a 1 with twenty-five zeroes after it, a number so much longer than the age of the universe that the comparison stops meaning anything. (Google)

Let that sit for a second. Not “faster.” Not “a thousand times faster.” A gap so wide it’s basically a different category of machine.

Willow is a quantum computer — and it represents one of the most jaw-dropping technologies humanity has ever built. It’s also, in a very specific and manageable way, coming for the locks that keep your entire digital life private. Both of those things are true at once, and this is one of those rare stories where understanding it now — while there’s still loads of time — is the whole game.

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Let’s start with the wonder, because it’s genuinely spectacular.

✨ The wonderful part: a machine that speaks nature’s own language

Here’s the one idea that makes quantum computers click.

Your laptop, your phone, Google’s giant data centres — every ordinary computer thinks in bits, tiny switches that are either a 1 or a 0. On or off. That’s it. Everything you’ve ever done on a computer is, underneath, a blizzard of those on/off switches.

A quantum computer uses qubits, and a qubit can be a 1, a 0, or — thanks to the genuinely bizarre rules of quantum physics — a blend of both at once. String a few together and they can explore a staggering number of possibilities in parallel, rather than plodding through them one at a time. For most everyday tasks this is useless overkill; a quantum machine will never speed up your email. But for a special class of monstrously hard problems, it’s like going from checking every door in a city by hand to checking them all in the same instant.

And the most exciting of those problems is this: simulating nature itself.

The world at its smallest — molecules, electrons, the way atoms bond — runs on quantum rules. Ordinary computers are hopeless at modelling it, because they’d have to fake with brute force what a quantum system does naturally. A quantum computer doesn’t fake it. It speaks the same language. That’s why the promised payoffs read like a wish list for the century:

• New medicines, designed by simulating exactly how a drug molecule latches onto a disease, instead of grinding through years of trial-and-error in a lab.

• Better batteries and materials — modelling new compounds atom by atom could crack longer-lasting EV batteries or room-temperature superconductors.

• Cleaner fertiliser — the chemical reaction that feeds half the planet is brutally energy-hungry; a quantum simulation might reveal a gentler recipe and shave a chunk off global emissions.

That’s the dream, and it’s not science-fiction hand-waving — it’s the specific reason governments and companies are pouring billions into this. The Willow milestone mattered because, for the first time in nearly thirty years of trying, Google showed it could make quantum computers catch their own mistakes faster than they make them — the single hardest engineering problem standing between “cute lab demo” and “world-changing machine.” (Nature)

So where’s the catch? The catch is that one of those “monstrously hard problems” a quantum computer is freakishly good at happens to be the exact sum that keeps your secrets secret.

🎭 The trapdoor: the lock isn’t broken yet — but the burglary already started

Almost everything private you do online is protected by a kind of mathematical padlock called public-key encryption (the big one is named RSA). It’s the little padlock in your browser bar. It scrambles your bank login, your messages, your medical records, a government’s diplomatic cables.

The padlock works because of a beautifully simple trick: it’s easy to multiply two enormous prime numbers together, but effectively impossible to take the result and work backwards to figure out which two numbers you started with. For a normal computer, reversing it would take longer than the lifetime of the universe. So we all just… trust it. The entire internet leans on that one asymmetry.

A big enough quantum computer erases it. There’s a known quantum recipe (Shor’s algorithm) that reverses the sum with ease. When a sufficiently powerful quantum machine exists, RSA doesn’t get weaker — it stops working, full stop.

Now, the reassuring part: that machine does not exist yet, and won’t for a while. Today’s best quantum computers have a few hundred to around a thousand fragile qubits. Cracking real encryption needs something far bigger and steadier. Most experts put the arrival of a code-breaking quantum computer somewhere between the early 2030s and 2040s — and honestly, nobody knows for sure. You do not need to panic about your bank tonight.

But here are the two things that turn “distant sci-fi worry” into “sensible to act now.”

First, the finish line is racing toward us. In May 2025, a Google researcher named Craig Gidney published a result that quietly stunned the field: he showed RSA-2048 could be broken with under one million qubits — a twenty-fold drop from the twenty million his own earlier work had estimated just a few years before. (arXiv; The Quantum Insider) The computer didn’t get twenty times more powerful. The math got twenty times cheaper. The target keeps sliding closer, and it tends to slide in the attackers’ favour.

Second — and this is the part almost nobody realises — the attack doesn’t wait for the computer. It’s called ”Harvest Now, Decrypt Later,” and it’s exactly what it sounds like. An adversary doesn’t need a quantum computer today to rob you with one tomorrow. They just need to copy your encrypted data now — vacuum it off the internet as it flies past, scrambled and “safe” — and park it on a hard drive until the day a quantum machine can unscramble it. (Palo Alto Networks)

Think about what that means. A secret you send today, locked with today’s padlock, can be stolen today and simply held — patiently — until the key exists. Security researchers and Western intelligence agencies believe several nation-states are already doing this at scale, hoovering up encrypted traffic they can’t read yet, betting they’ll read it later. (The Quantum Insider)

Which is why the honest question isn’t “when will quantum computers break encryption?” It’s: ”how long does this particular secret need to stay secret?” A funny text to a friend? Who cares. But your genome, your medical history, a company’s trade secrets, a country’s intelligence files, the long-term architecture of critical systems — those need to stay locked for decades. And anything with a decades-long shelf life that’s travelling the internet today, protected only by the old padlock, is already exposed. The burglary is happening in the present tense. The break-in just gets completed in the future.

🛡️ The good news: we already built the new lock, and it’s quietly being installed

Here’s the genuinely encouraging twist, and it’s why this is a “get ahead of it” story rather than a doom story: the fix is already here, and it doesn’t need a quantum computer to work.

Cryptographers saw this coming years ago and built a new family of padlocks — post-quantum cryptography (PQC) — based on math problems that even a quantum computer finds too hard to reverse. These run perfectly on the ordinary phones and laptops we already own. It’s a lock swap, not a hardware revolution.

And it’s not a lab prototype. In August 2024, the US standards body NIST finalised the first official post-quantum encryption standards after nearly a decade of public, worldwide vetting — the new locks the rest of the world is now adopting. (NIST) The quiet rollout is already well under way, probably on a device in your pocket:

• Signal switched on post-quantum protection back in September 2023.

• Apple upgraded iMessage to a post-quantum protocol it calls PQ3, rolling out in March 2024 — so recent iPhone messages are already being protected against the harvest-now game. (Apple Security Research)

• Google Chrome and other browsers have begun quietly using post-quantum keys to protect the connection between you and the websites you visit.

In other words: the grown-ups have started changing the locks, and for the everyday stuff, it’s happening for you, automatically, in the background. You don’t have to understand the math. You mostly just have to not stand in the way of the updates.

✅ What to actually do

This week, pick the row that’s you:

1. You just want to be sensible, with minimal fuss: the single best move is keep your devices and apps updated — the post-quantum locks arrive inside ordinary software updates, so “update everything” is, quietly, quantum-proofing. For anything you’d want private in ten years, prefer apps that already use post-quantum protection (Signal, and up-to-date iMessage between iPhones). That’s it. You’re done.

2. You run a business or handle other people’s data: ask one question out loud — “What data of ours has to stay confidential for ten-plus years, and is any of it crossing the internet protected only by old-style encryption?” Then start a cryptographic inventory: a simple map of where you use RSA-style encryption, so you know what to swap first when you migrate to the NIST post-quantum standards. Healthcare, finance, legal and anyone holding long-lived personal data are the front line — because your data is the juiciest harvest-now target there is.

3. You’re just here to understand it: the one line to remember is — quantum computers are a miracle for simulating nature and a slow-motion problem for encryption, and the smart response (“swap to new locks now”) is already rolling out. The urgency isn’t the computer; it’s that stolen-today data can be unlocked tomorrow.

And zoom out:

Notice this is what a well-handled technology shift looks like. We spotted the threat a decade early, built the replacement, standardised it, and started deploying it before the dangerous machine even exists. That almost never happens in security — usually we’re mopping up after the disaster. Notice the rare case where we’re ahead of it, and let the updates do their job.

The takeaway

Quantum computing is going to be one of the defining wonders of our lifetimes. A machine that thinks in nature’s own language could hand us medicines, materials and clean chemistry that ordinary computers could never reach — and Willow’s five-minutes-versus-ten-septillion-years moment was the field quietly turning a corner it had been stuck on for thirty years.

The same power that simulates a molecule can, eventually, unpick the padlock on your data. But “eventually” is the key word, and it’s why there’s no need for alarm — only a bit of foresight. The one genuinely counterintuitive thing to carry with you is that the theft can happen long before the technology to complete it arrives: harvest now, decrypt later. Anything that must stay secret for decades is worth protecting with the new locks today.

The wonderful part is that we’re not helpless and we’re not late. The new locks exist, they run on the phone in your hand, and they’re being slipped into place while you read this. Keep your stuff updated, favour the apps that already made the switch, and you get the whole prize: front-row seats to a genuine marvel, without leaving a copy of your secrets on a shelf for someone to open later.

Stay curious, and keep your locks fresh.

— itscybernews

Know someone who thinks quantum computing is pure sci-fi — or a security-minded friend who’d love the “harvest now, decrypt later” twist? Forward this along. And hit reply to tell us what you’d like us to dig into next: we read every one.

Sources

Google — Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip: https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/research/google-willow-quantum-chip/

Nature — Quantum error correction below the surface code threshold: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08449-y

arXiv — How to factor 2048-bit RSA integers with less than a million noisy qubits (Gidney, 2025): https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15917

The Quantum Insider — Google researcher lowers the quantum bar to crack RSA: https://thequantuminsider.com/2025/05/24/google-researcher-lowers-quantum-bar-to-crack-rsa-encryption/

Palo Alto Networks — Harvest Now, Decrypt Later: https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/cyberpedia/harvest-now-decrypt-later-hndl

The Quantum Insider — What is Harvest Now, Decrypt Later, and why should you care: https://thequantuminsider.com/2026/05/01/harvest-now-decrypt-later-why-should-you-care/

NIST — First 3 finalized post-quantum encryption standards: https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2024/08/nist-releases-first-3-finalized-post-quantum-encryption-standards

Apple Security Research — iMessage with PQ3: https://security.apple.com/blog/imessage-pq3/