Post-Quantum Cryptography: Why It Matters for Your Privacy Today
In 2019, Google announced "quantum supremacy" — a quantum processor completing a specific calculation in 200 seconds that would take the world's fastest classical supercomputer 10,000 years. In 2023, IBM's Condor processor hit 1,121 qubits. In 2025, Microsoft demonstrated error-corrected logical qubits operating above the fault-tolerance threshold. The timeline for cryptographically relevant quantum computing — machines powerful enough to break the encryption protecting the internet — has gone from speculative to serious.
Why Quantum Computers Threaten Current Encryption
Most of the encryption protecting your location data, your communications, and your identity relies on mathematical problems that are hard for classical computers to solve. RSA encryption is based on the difficulty of factoring large numbers. Elliptic curve cryptography (used in modern TLS, Signal, and most location data pipelines) relies on the discrete logarithm problem. Both are hard for classical computers. Both are efficiently solvable by a sufficiently powerful quantum computer running Shor's algorithm.
What Post-Quantum Cryptography Is
Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) refers to cryptographic algorithms believed to be resistant to attack by quantum computers. In 2024, NIST standardized three PQC algorithms: ML-KEM (CRYSTALS-Kyber) for key encapsulation, ML-DSA (CRYSTALS-Dilithium) for digital signatures, and SLH-DSA (SPHINCS+) for hash-based signatures. These algorithms are based on mathematical problems — primarily lattice problems — that have no known efficient quantum algorithm.
How CloakLoc Is Built for This
CloakLoc's encryption stack was designed from the start with post-quantum migration in mind. Our key exchange uses hybrid construction — classical ECDH combined with ML-KEM — so that security is maintained even if one of the two algorithms is broken. Our signing uses ML-DSA for all integrity-critical operations. This is not retrofitting — the architecture assumed quantum adversaries from day one.
The location data you generate is encrypted at collection with algorithms that are resistant to both classical and quantum attack. Even in a future where powerful quantum computers exist, the historical records produced by CloakLoc cannot be retrospectively decrypted. And since those records are synthetic to begin with, the attack surface is doubly closed.