Regarding the Luxembourg Quantum Computing initiative,  LuxQCI

Successful people ask better questions.

Prime numbers keep our encrypted messages safe as they proved to be fundamental to the most common type of encryption used today: the RSA algorithm (allows a message to be encrypted without the sender knowing the key).

The reason prime numbers are fundamental to RSA encryption is because when you multiply two together, the result is a number that can only be broken down into those primes (and itself * 1).

But when using much larger prime numbers, it’s pretty much impossible for computers to nut them out.

But with QC (polynomial time) this decryption of the public key encryption becomes possible from where one can get the private key.

But today, QC hardware is still missing, but in a decade or two, it will be there, that’s for sure.

Therefore,  it makes sense to introduce post QC encryption already now and apply these to these vulnerable data of 2021. This PQC encryption is in development.

On the other side of the ocean, there’s NIST also involved in these reflections as far as we know.

With NIST, researchers were able to submit their proposals in this regard and a whole process is in place to bring some of these proposals to the next rounds.

A new standard would come out next year or so, which can be implemented.

The challenges about QC and encryption maybe global, but it would make sense to look from a European angle as well to this PQC subject.