In this urgent security assessment from January 30, 2026, the Qubit Value podcast conducts a comprehensive audit of the encryption standards currently securing the global economy, declaring many of them obsolete in the face of quantum advancements. The hosts identify RSA (2048/4096-bit) and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC/ECDSA) as "definitively vulnerable," warning that ECC is particularly fragile against quantum attacks due to its smaller key sizes. They flag the ubiquitous Diffie-Hellman key exchange as a systemic risk, noting that it secures nearly 95% of web traffic. To counter the immediate "Harvest Now, Decrypt Later" threat, the episode prescribes a mandatory migration to NIST's approved Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) standards: ML-KEM (formerly Kyber) for key encapsulation, ML-DSA (formerly Dilithium) for digital signatures, Falcon for efficiency in constrained environments, and Sphincs+ (SLHDSA) as a conservative hash-based backup. The discussion concludes by urging executives to adopt a "Hybrid" strategy—pairing classical algorithms with quantum-resistant ones—and to achieve full crypto-agility by the industry's hard deadline of 2030.
