Quantum Threat Intelligence: What the Intelligence Community Needs to Know About CRQC Timelines and Cryptanalytic Risk
Intelligence community professionals are working with CRQC timeline assessments that vary significantly between institutions and between the classified and open-source literature. The gap between the most and least optimistic credible estimates has consequences: for harvest-now-decrypt-later exposure, for migration priority-setting, and for the assessment of adversary capability timelines. This briefing is for senior intelligence professionals who need a peer exchange on the honest state of the threat picture, informed by what the academic literature is now showing.
Event Details
- Who else is in the room
- Senior level executive peers, industry leaders, experts in risk, technology and business. Specifically: senior intelligence professionals, directors, and analysts with responsibility for signals intelligence security, cryptographic systems assessment, or adversary quantum capability tracking.
- Access
- Members only. Bundled with Expert Membership. Included with Expert Member tier
- Sponsor
- Organised by QSECDEF
- Facilitator
-
Anna Beata Kalisz Hedegaard Quantum Security Defence - Rules of engagement
- Chatham House Rule Chatham House Rule. Discussion is on the record; attribution is not. Participants may share what was said but not who said it.
- Format
- Structured Q&A Flexible between roundtable, structured Q&A or in-person hosted dinner
- Who Should Join
- This briefing is for senior intelligence professionals, directors, deputy directors, and senior analysts, with direct responsibility for signals intelligence security, cryptographic systems assessment, or adversary quantum capability tracking. It is relevant to senior officials at national intelligence agencies and allied community equivalents. It is not for junior analysts or technical collection staff without strategic assessment authority. Participants are expected to hold appropriate access for a frank discussion of CRQC timeline implications for current intelligence operations.
About This Conversation
Why this matters now
The academic literature on quantum hardware progress has moved faster than most institutional assessments anticipated. Gidney's 2025 resource estimates for breaking RSA-2048 use approximately 897,864 physical qubits and a 4.96-day runtime, representing a significant reduction from the 2019 estimate of approximately 20 million physical qubits. The March 2026 update to elliptic curve cryptography vulnerability estimates (Babbush et al., arXiv:2603.28846v2) tightened the threshold to approximately 500,000 physical qubits for solving ECDLP-256. Intelligence systems that rely on ECC for key exchange and authentication are in a more exposed position than those still assessed against 2020-era resource estimates. The harvest-now-decrypt-later window for intelligence collected under current cryptographic protection is therefore shorter than most institutional planning assumes.
Outcomes
What you will leave with
- A peer exchange on where different intelligence community institutions stand on CRQC timeline assessment: where estimates are converging and where significant divergence remains
- A frank view of the harvest-now-decrypt-later exposure: which categories of intelligence collected today have the highest long-term sensitivity, and how the current cryptographic protection stacks against updated resource estimates
- A shared assessment of adversary quantum programme status: where the open-source literature diverges from classified assessments, and what that gap implies for collection priority
- Practical framing for the migration sequencing problem in intelligence systems: which cryptographic systems are highest priority to migrate first, given sensitivity tiers and access patterns
- Peer relationships with intelligence professionals from allied institutions who are working the same assessment problem under different mandates
Your Facilitator
Anna Beata Kalisz Hedegaard
Founder, QSECDEF
Anna Beata Kalisz Hedegaard has over 15 years of international experience in deep-tech, telecommunications, and defence communications networks. Her expertise spans intellectual property, advanced communications systems, and quantum secure communications. She has lived and worked across Poland, Denmark, the United States, Malaysia, the Netherlands, and Germany. Anna holds dual Master of Science degrees in Theoretical Cosmology from the University of Southern Denmark and Electrical Engineering from Wright State University, USA. She is the founder and board member of Quantum Security Defence.
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