# The Clock Is Already Running: CISA and G7 Sound the Alarm on Post-Quantum Readiness
## The Threat
Quantum computing doesn't break encryption today. But "harvest now, decrypt later" attacks are already happening — adversaries with long intelligence horizons are stockpiling encrypted traffic today, betting they'll have the compute to crack it within a decade. That's not a hypothetical. It's a documented strategy attributed to nation-state actors, and it means the transition to post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is not a future problem. It is a present one.
CISA, alongside the Group of Seven Cyber Security Working Group, released a joint advisory — *Preparing for the Post-Quantum Era: A Call to Action* — that makes this point with unusual directness for a government document. The guidance doesn't traffic in abstractions; it names five concrete priorities and frames the transition as an organizational imperative, not a long-range research project.
The core problem is structural: RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography, the backbone of TLS, digital signatures, and VPNs, are mathematically vulnerable to a sufficiently powerful quantum computer running Shor's algorithm. NIST finalized its first post-quantum standards in 2024 (ML-KEM, ML-DSA, SLH-DSA), giving organizations something concrete to migrate toward. The CISA/G7 advisory is the policy machinery designed to make that migration happen before the window closes.
## Severity and Impact
This advisory doesn't carry a CVE — it's a strategic policy document, not a disclosure. The risk it describes is systemic rather than product-specific. The table below captures the threat profile as framed by the advisory.
| Attribute | Detail |
|---|---|
| Advisory Type | Strategic Guidance / Policy |
| Issuing Bodies | CISA, G7 Cyber Security Working Group |
| Threat Category | Cryptographic Algorithm Obsolescence |
| Attack Model | Harvest Now, Decrypt Later (HNDL); Future Cryptanalytic Attack |
| Timeline Estimate | 10–15 years (consensus); potentially sooner |
| Primary Risk | Compromise of RSA, ECC, DH-based systems at scale |
| Standards Reference | NIST FIPS 203, 204, 205 (finalized August 2024) |
| CWE Reference | CWE-327 (Use of Broken or Risky Cryptographic Algorithm) |
The affected sectors are broad: financial services, critical infrastructure, healthcare, defense contractors, and any organization holding data with long-term confidentiality requirements. Governments face the sharpest exposure — classified communications and citizen databases may need to remain confidential for decades.
## Affected Products
Post-quantum risk doesn't map to a discrete product list — it maps to cryptographic primitives in use across virtually every networked system. Organizations should audit for exposure in:
Authentication & Identity
Communications & Transport
Data at Rest
Operational Technology
## Mitigations
The G7 advisory structures its recommendations around five priorities. Here's what those priorities mean in practice for security teams:
1. Raise quantum risk awareness internally
Board-level briefings, procurement team education, and developer training on PQC-safe libraries. Awareness is prerequisite to budget.
2. Develop or align with a national/organizational PQC strategy
Map your cryptographic inventory now. You cannot migrate what you haven't catalogued. Tools like CISA's Cybersecurity Performance Goals and NIST's PQC migration guidance provide frameworks.
3. Invest in quantum-safe R&D and pilots
Begin testing NIST-standardized algorithms (ML-KEM for key encapsulation, ML-DSA for digital signatures) in non-production environments. Several major cloud providers and TLS library maintainers already have experimental support.
4. Engage public-private partnerships
Share threat intelligence about HNDL activity with sector-specific ISACs. Vendors need to know customers are requiring PQC roadmaps.
5. Integrate PQC into procurement and compliance requirements
Update RFPs, vendor security questionnaires, and internal security baselines to require PQC readiness timelines from suppliers. Federal contractors should track OMB and CISA mandates closely — PQC requirements in federal procurement are coming.
Immediate actions for security teams:
## References
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## HackWire Analysis
The CISA/G7 advisory is diplomatically worded, but read between the lines and the message is blunt: most organizations are nowhere near ready, and the gap between where they are and where they need to be is measured in years of engineering work, not months.
What makes the harvest-now-decrypt-later threat genuinely insidious is that it requires no zero-day, no phishing kit, and no on-target presence. Passive interception of encrypted traffic — the kind that happens at undersea cables, internet exchange points, and ISP infrastructure — is sufficient. Nation-states with the patience and storage capacity to run HNDL programs are already doing so. The data being collected today may be mundane. But enterprise communications, financial negotiations, and health records encrypted with 2048-bit RSA in 2026 could be readable to an adversary in 2035.
The industries with the most acute exposure are also the ones with the slowest upgrade cycles. Medical devices, industrial control systems, and embedded hardware in critical infrastructure don't get annual patches. A hospital deploying an infusion pump today may be running that device for twelve years. If it uses classical cryptography and can't be field-updated, the calculus is grim.
Financial services deserve a specific mention: transaction records and KYC data have regulatory retention requirements that can stretch a decade or more. A bank's encrypted 2026 records might sit in cold storage until 2036. That's squarely inside the risk window.
The move from awareness to action is where these advisories historically stall. The PQC transition needs procurement leverage — buyers demanding quantum-safe roadmaps from vendors — more than it needs another framework document. That's the pressure point security leaders should be pushing on right now.
— HackWire Editorial
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