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The RSA cryptographic algorithm was developed in 1977, so its 50th anniversary falls in 2027—not 2026. Its history is closely tied to the internet’s security, but a sufficiently capable future quantum computer could undermine RSA and other widely used public-key systems. NIST has finalized replacement standards and urges organizations to start planning their migration now.
Here, RSA means the public-key algorithm, not RSA Security, the company founded in 1982. The two are related by history, but they are not interchangeable.
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What does RSA do, and why does its 50th year matter?
RSA is a public-key cryptographic algorithm, named for its developers Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman. It uses a public key that can be shared and a corresponding private key that must be protected. Its security rests on the difficulty of factoring very large integers. This made it useful for establishing secure communication and supporting digital signatures across networks where parties might not otherwise trust one another.
RSA Security’s account of the technology’s history connects RSA and public-key infrastructure (PKI) with the development of SSL/TLS, e-commerce, secure email and digital signatures. Those systems helped make online transactions and communications practical. The company says the algorithm was developed in 1977, entered the public domain in 2000 and is now a public standard. The 50-year mark refers to the development year; it does not mean RSA first appeared online in 1977.
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RSA Security, by contrast, was founded in 1982. Its company and identity products should not be confused with the RSA algorithm itself.
What is post-quantum cryptography?
Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) means cryptographic methods designed to resist attacks from both conventional computers and future quantum computers. It does not mean cryptography that runs only on a quantum computer. NIST’s standardization effort took eight years; its initial submission deadline produced 69 candidate algorithms for evaluation.
The concern is that a sufficiently capable quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm could solve the mathematical problems that protect RSA, Diffie–Hellman and elliptic-curve cryptography. That makes these systems vulnerable in principle to a future quantum threat. Current quantum computers are not established as capable of breaking deployed RSA, and the sources cited by NIST and RSA Security do not provide a dependable date for when such a capability will arrive.
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When will quantum computers break RSA?
There is no dependable arrival date to give. The relevant question for organizations is not only when a quantum computer might be capable of breaking RSA, but how long protected information must remain secret and how much time a migration will take.
“Harvest now, decrypt later” describes an adversary collecting encrypted information today in the hope of decrypting it later, if quantum capabilities become sufficient. This risk matters most for information that must remain confidential for many years. A system that encrypts traffic now may therefore need attention before any quantum computer can break its encryption.
Which post-quantum standards has NIST finalized?
In August 2024, NIST finalized three principal PQC standards. They address different cryptographic tasks; they are not interchangeable replacements that all do the same job.
| Standard | NIST designation | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| ML-KEM | FIPS 203 | Key establishment: helping parties establish a shared secret for protected communication. |
| ML-DSA | FIPS 204 | Digital signatures. |
| SLH-DSA | FIPS 205 | Digital signatures using a stateless hash-based approach. |
The standards are available for implementation. Choosing among them depends on the task a system needs to perform and its implementation requirements. NIST’s overview and standards listings do not establish a quantitative performance comparison suitable for ranking them here.
How should organizations prepare for post-quantum cryptography?
NIST recommends starting migration now, beginning with an inventory of where vulnerable cryptography is used. Its project guidance says quantum-vulnerable algorithms are to be deprecated and ultimately removed from NIST standards by 2035, with high-risk systems moving earlier. That is NIST’s transition timeline, not a universal legal deadline for every organization.
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- Inventory cryptography. Identify where RSA, Diffie–Hellman, elliptic-curve cryptography and other quantum-vulnerable algorithms appear across applications, infrastructure, certificates, protocols, products and services. Include systems run by suppliers as well as those managed in-house.
- Prioritize what must stay secret. Identify data with long confidentiality lifetimes, then assess which systems protect, transmit or store it. This helps surface exposure to harvest-now-decrypt-later risk.
- Map dependencies and constraints. Record which protocols, certificates, vendors and devices rely on vulnerable cryptography. Pay particular attention to constrained devices and interoperability: a cryptographic change may require coordinated updates across connected systems.
- Plan and test the transition. Work with vendors and internal system owners to plan changes to products, services and protocols. Test that updated systems can interoperate before relying on them in production, and plan how to handle components that cannot be updated on the same schedule.
NIST’s migration work is focused in part on ways to find and prioritize vulnerable systems and support interoperable solutions. This makes PQC migration an operational planning effort, not simply a matter of swapping one algorithm for another.
What the transition does—and does not—mean
The finalized standards give organizations a basis for beginning implementation, but they do not mean every internet service or device has already migrated. The sources cited here do not provide a reliable current percentage of public-internet deployment. Nor does the 2035 NIST transition timeline predict when quantum computers will break RSA: it describes NIST’s planned standards transition.
For the 50th year of RSA’s development, the practical lesson is that successful cryptography has to evolve as computing capabilities change. Organizations do not need to predict the exact year of a quantum breakthrough to start identifying long-lived secrets, locating vulnerable dependencies and preparing coordinated, interoperable changes.
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