Our team has been busy with several new releases this week. We launched an educational website How Big Is Too Big, which visualizes the speed and size trade-offs of various post-quantum cryptography schemes. We also published two new blog posts: What is Quantum Computing, a beginner-friendly intro, and Countdown to Q-Day – Part 1, which kicks off a series examining when quantum computers might break current encryption. In this bulletin, we’ll explore today’s headlines and highlight recent developments like the Countdown to Q-Day and How Big Is Too Big.
If you are new to the quantum computing world, or a seasoned veteran looking to reinforce your knowledge, look no further. In Countdown to Q-Day - Part 1, our CEO & Co-Founder Alex Pruden has started a series on quantum computing and its application to cryptography. It aims to contextualize not only the principles of quantum computing, but its application to post-quantum cryptography and the considerations to achieve practical implementation.
Where this may differ, and be beneficial, is its steering to post-quantum cryptography and its conservative approach to the implication. If you are interested in going beyond foundations and looking for more contextual applications or forecasting, look out for subsequent posts detailing the role of quantum computers in the realm of cryptography. The first part is already published, so keep your eyes peeled for subsequent posts that further contextualize Project Eleven’s mission.
The advent of quantum computers requires a paradigm shift for cybersecurity. One of the pressing questions around this shift is how effective quantum computing methods will be for cracking lattice-based encryption methods like Learning With Errors (LWE) or other mathematical assumptions. As of now, the security provided by lattice-based encryption is well outside the bounds of quantum computing both theoretically and practically. If quantum computing aims to dethrone lattice-based encryption, it will have to make an unparalleled evolution, or wait for the next paradigm shifting improvement.
A pre-print from Princeton is interesting in that it sidesteps the need for amplitude periodicity; it presents itself with a different overhead, one of modular exponentiation. Although the pair-shift difference does address the oversight of a previous paper, it still requires a considerable amount of hardware resources or parameters that are not yet realizable. It is reassuring to see members of the post-quantum cryptography community self-police themselves and improve upon past works. This pre-print was especially intriguing and beneficial as it provided an alternative method to approach the problem, and removed amplitude periodicity as a byproduct. This paper provides an improvement and a different approach to lattice-based encryption cracking that quantum computing may be able to undermine, but not without considerable algorithmic and hardware improvements.
Speaking of progress, Alex has been tracking the rapid developments in quantum computing hardware across the industry. In just the past month, multiple breakthroughs have been announced, suggesting an accelerating trajectory toward more powerful and practical quantum machines. Here we highlight four notable updates across different technologies (modalities):
Alice & Bob. Cat qubits now show hour-scale bit-flip stability on a 12-qubit Helium-2 chip—far beyond typical transmons, dramatically cutting error-correction overhead (potentially ~200× fewer physical qubits per logical if phase flips stay controlled).
IBM. IBM crossed the 1K-qubit mark with Condor and boosted quality with Heron; tunable couplers reduce cross-talk and deliver several-times higher effective performance. With high fidelities and the modular Quantum System Two, the stack is aimed squarely at fault tolerance.
IonQ. The new Tempo system hit Algorithmic Qubits #AQ 64 ahead of schedule on ~100 ions with all-to-all connectivity and long coherence; reported ~99.99% two-qubit gates put targeted quantum advantage within reach.
Quantinuum. The H2 ion-trap system (56 ions) set a record Quantum Volume (2²⁵), building on H1’s “three-nines” two-qubit gates and QV ≥ 2²⁰. Next-gen Helios is the next step toward practical logical qubits.
These advances aren’t isolated jumps; they add up to a steady march toward CRQCs capable of running the long, low-error circuits needed to break ECDSA/BLS. That trend effectively shortens the timeline for blockchains, so treat it as a scheduling problem: enable post-quantum signatures, line up rotations for exposed keys, pilot PQ-secure links, and bind today’s addresses to future PQ keys now.
Our new visualizer at HowBigIsTooBig.com compares today’s EdDSA with the leading post-quantum signature families ML-DSA, FN-DSA, and SLH-DSA, so you can see how each choice affects real systems. The interactive tool shows the trade-offs that matter in practice: signature and key sizes, signing/verification throughput, and the knock-on effects for TLS handshakes, blockchain payloads, and storage. The takeaway: PQ signatures are essential, but they’re not interchangeable. ML-DSA is robust and general-purpose, FN-DSA is faster and more compact but finicky to implement well, and SLH-DSA is conservative and stateless but larger. Use the tool to pick the right fit for your bandwidth, latency, and verification budgets as we count down to Q-Day.
A hot topic of this last week was HSBC and IBM implementing quantum computers to tackle a problem in finance around algorithmic bond trading. It is promising to see real-world quantum computing applications go from fairy tale to fact. It may be a limited use case when considering all financial mechanisms being utilized but it helps benchmark what quantum computing can do with real world data at this time. Beyond the achievement, it could serve as a potential opportunity for industry to give more consideration to quantum computing as a supplement to current systems. All in all, it is drawing us nearer to a potential Q-Day.
Last Bulletin we mentioned the AMA with Steve Tippeconnic on the Superpositions forum, and we’re happy to report that Steve delivered some fascinating answers. In the AMA, Steve discussed how he used IBM’s latest 133-qubit quantum processor to perform a Shor’s algorithm style attack on an elliptic curve key. He explained that the quantum program was extremely demanding: “An 18‑qubit circuit (~340,000 layers deep) produced a valid interference pattern from 16,384 shots, and classical post-processing revealed k = 42”, successfully recovering the secret 6-bit key. This experimental demo required cleverly encoding the problem into a small 64-element group (since 6-bit keys have 2^6 = 64 possibilities) and leveraging Qiskit Runtime 2.0 to execute a whopping 340k-depth circuit on the ibm_torino quantum system.
Steve put the result in context: the barrier to scaling is “preserving phase coherence as the oracle and QFT depth grow,” and each added bit “doubles each axis” of the interference grid so the per-site signal weakens while errors accumulate. In practice, he sees ~7 bits doable now, ~10–12 bits plausible on near-term hardware, and ~20 bits needing “~10×” better two-qubit fidelity or light fault tolerance. Crucially, “scaling from a 6-bit demo to a 256-bit break is not linear,” and real ECC attacks would require “fault-tolerant architectures” and major hardware leaps. The value today is evidencing a clean, reproducible ridge in hardware, which is proof that phase-sensitive, Shor-style plumbing is maturing, even as true ECDSA/EdDSA breaks edge ever closer.
News of the Week
Quantum Brilliance, CyberSeQ and LuxProvide partner to advance PQC with certified randomness – The trio signed a letter of intent to integrate quantum-derived true randomness into PQC workflows, validating on LuxProvide’s MeluXina supercomputer to meet emerging “certified randomness” requirements in standards.
Post-Quantum Cryptography - NCSC Cyber Series (podcast) – Dr Jeremy Bradley and colleagues discuss what “quantum-ready” means in practice and how orgs should plan PQC migration; useful, policy-aware guidance from the UK’s NCSC.
You don’t need quantum hardware for post-quantum security – Cloudflare argues PQC runs on today’s servers, no QKD/QRNG required, urging crypto-agility now and noting it already uses PQ key agreement widely across its network.
Post-Quantum Encryption: The VPN Buzzword You Should Actually Care About – PCMag UK’s explainer on what “post-quantum” means for VPNs and what users should look for as providers begin rolling it out.
ETSI tackles quantum with dedicated group – Europe’s standards body set up a Technical Committee on Quantum Technologies to coordinate specs for quantum comms, networking, RNGs and security, with the first meeting slated for December.
Until next time,
The Project Eleven Team
[email protected]