Google is dramatically shortening its readiness deadline for the arrival of Q Day, the point at which existing quantum computers can break public-key cryptography algorithms that secure decades’ worth of secrets belonging to militaries, banks, governments, and nearly every individual on earth.
In a post published on Wednesday, Google said it is giving itself until 2029 to prepare for this event. The post went on to warn that the rest of the world needs to follow suit by adopting PQC—short for post-quantum cryptography—algorithms to augment or replace elliptic curves and RSA, both of which will be broken.
The end is nigh
“As a pioneer in both quantum and PQC, it’s our responsibility to lead by example and share an ambitious timeline,” wrote Heather Adkins, Google’s VP of security engineering, and Sophie Schmieg, a senior cryptography engineer. “By doing this, we hope to provide the clarity and urgency needed to accelerate digital transitions not only for Google, but also across the industry.”
Separately, Google detailed its timeline for making Android quantum resistant, the first time the company has publicly discussed PQC support on the operating system. Starting with the beta version, Android 17 will support ML-DSA, a digital signing algorithm standard advanced by the National Institute for Standards and Technology. ML-DSA will be added to Android’s hardware root of trust. The move will allow developers to have PQC keys for signing their apps and verifying other software signatures.
Google said it now has ML-DSA integrated into the Android verified boot library, which secures the boot sequence against manipulation. Google engineers are also beginning to move remote attestation to PQC. Remote attestation is a feature that allows a device to prove its current state to a remote server to, for example, prove to a server on a corporate network that it’s running a secure OS version.