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QKD is provably secure only if its devices behave as modeled and its classical channel is already authenticated. NSA, the NCSC, and four European agencies allow it a niche role at most, citing implementation attacks, trusted relays, and cost.
NIST, the NSA, Britain's NCSC, the EU, Canada, and Australia all ask organizations to start post-quantum migration now. None claims a code-breaking quantum computer exists or gives it a known date. Their deadlines do not depend on either claim.
Under NIS2 and DORA, regulated entities must keep cryptography policies that track the state of the art and advances in codebreaking. The EU's 2030 and 2035 post-quantum dates remain recommendations, and the proposed NIS2 amendment has not passed.
From a Finnish refrigerator at IBM to physicists trained in Britain, France, and Australia, U.S. quantum computers draw on other countries. Many domestic substitutes are years from scale, so Washington needs allied supply as well as factories.
Polynomial-time quantum algorithms for factoring and quantum simulation are backed by complexity theory. Grover search gains are at most quadratic. Optimization and machine learning on ordinary data rely mostly on heuristics, and researchers have matched several claimed speedups classically.
Riverlane, NVIDIA, and several control-electronics makers now sell parts of the loop that turns error checks into corrections. Among the superconducting tests surveyed, loops using Riverlane's decoder have met a 10-microsecond budget, in small configurations only.
Rydberg-atom receivers sense radio waves with laser-probed atoms in a centimeter-scale glass cell and tune from about 100 kilohertz to terahertz frequencies. In published comparisons, conventional receivers still detect weaker signals in most bands.
Microwave atomic clocks keep GPS time, and Exail says more than 20 of its cold-atom gravimeters are deployed. Quantum navigation units, wearable brain scanners, and atom-based radio receivers are still being tested against the classical instruments they would replace.
QuEra sells neutral-atom machines with 256 and 260 physical qubits, while Harvard and MIT teams that include its co-founders have run arrays of more than 3,000 atoms. Its Libra computer, due in 2028, is the test.
Error-correction, key-distribution, and algorithmic decoders are three of several jobs that share one name. Only the first runs against a machine's clock, where its speed and accuracy affect the clock rate and qubit cost of fault-tolerant designs.
