NIST Says No Near-Term Danger from Quantum Codebreaking After Google’s Quantum Supremacy Announcement

(FCW.com) An official from the National Institute of Standards and Technology said there’s no near-term danger that modern tools will be able break current encryption methods Despite recent industry claims of quantum supremacy.
Matthew Scholl, chief of the Computer Science Division at NIST, said recently that the agency still believes “relevant” quantum codebreaking is still years away. “I want to assure people that the step from Google’s announcement of quantum supremacy to having a quantum machine that is cryptographically relevant — meaning something that will actually be able to break our current public-key infrastructure — is really a significantly wide gap,” Scholl said.
“We still feel quite confidently — not just NIST but the global community that we’re working with — that the timeline that we’re on for developing and deploying quantum-resistant encryption standards is still relevant,” he said. “So we’re still looking at 2022 to 2024 for having those standards complete.”