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The Quantum Threat, Quantified

How many qubits, for how long, and by when — Shor and Grover derived from scratch, the surface-code cost of a real RSA break, honest resource estimates with uncertainty bands, and Mosca's inequality turned into a migration-priority model. Grounded in the primary papers.

Murali Chillakuru·5 episodes
  1. 24 min Episode 1Shor's Algorithm, Structurally: Period-Finding and the Quantum Fourier TransformA moderator and a quantum-computing expert open the hood on the algorithm that breaks RSA — how factoring reduces to finding a hidden period, what the Quantum Fourier Transform does, how period-finding works, how continued fractions recover the answer, where the exponential speedup comes from, what the algorithm assumes, and exactly what it does and doesn't break.
  2. 24 min Episode 2Grover and the Symmetric World: Why the Speedup Only Halves SecurityA moderator and a quantum-computing expert examine the milder quantum threat — the search problem Grover actually solves, the mark-and-invert iteration, why its speedup is only quadratic and provably cannot be beaten, how it halves symmetric security, its subtler effect on hashes, why the practical threat is milder than the asymptotics, and the symmetric posture in a nutshell.
  3. 25 min Episode 3From Logical to Physical Qubits: The Surface-Code Cost of a Real RSA BreakA moderator and a quantum-hardware expert explain the gap between algorithms and machines — why the raw Shor circuit can't run on real qubits, the threshold theorem that makes reliability from unreliability, how the surface code and its distance buy protection, why magic-state distillation dominates the cost, a concrete figure for breaking RSA, and what to actually watch.
  4. 25 min Episode 4Resource Estimates and Timelines: Reading the Numbers CriticallyA moderator and a quantum-computing expert teach how to interpret quantum-threat forecasts — why an estimate is a model not a measurement, why the physical error rate dominates the answer, why estimates keep falling as methods improve, why a single predicted date is statistically unsound, a procedure for reading any claim, and how to turn a range into a migration decision.
  5. 25 min Episode 5Mosca's Inequality: Turning Data Shelf-Life into a Migration PriorityIn the quantum-threat finale, a moderator and a security-strategy expert distill everything into a decision rule — the three durations of Mosca's inequality, why harvest-now-decrypt-later makes shelf-life binding, how the inequality becomes a priority ranking, how to handle the uncertainty in quantum arrival, the migration program it implies, and the verdict for long-lived data.