Harvest Now, Decrypt Later
The most dangerous quantum attack doesn't wait for a quantum computer. It has already begun — silently, passively, and with zero indicators of compromise.
Collect
Encrypted traffic is copied at wire speed across TLS, VPN, and email. Nothing is decrypted, modified, or delayed — collection is invisible from the defender's side.
Archive
Intercepted ciphertext moves into long-term storage — a queryable database of the world's secrets, waiting for the key that doesn't exist yet.
Decrypt
On Q-Day, a cryptographically relevant quantum computer runs Shor's algorithm and the entire archive becomes readable. Retroactively. All at once.
The machine it needs keeps getting smaller
Q-Day hasn't arrived — but the resources required to reach it keep collapsing. Estimates of the qubits needed to break today's cryptography have fallen from tens of millions to hundreds of thousands in a few years. The danger has not arrived; the engineering gap is narrowing, not widening.
