$ Where this all comes from
Six real, dated milestones from the idea of public-key cryptography to the standards already replacing it -- the actual timeline this project's two labs sit on either end of.
Watch first
A short walkthrough of the same six milestones below, start to finish: from the idea of public-key cryptography in 1976 to the post-quantum standards already replacing RSA today. The timeline underneath has the full detail, real links, and the exact sources each date comes from.
1976
Diffie & Hellman propose public-key cryptography
"New Directions in Cryptography" introduces the idea that two people could share a secret without ever meeting in person -- built on operations that are cheap to run forward and expensive to reverse. It described the shape of the solution before anyone had built one.
1977
Rivest, Shamir & Adleman publish RSA
At MIT, RSA becomes the first practical realization of that idea: encrypt with a public key (N, e), decrypt with a private key (N, d), secure because factoring N back into its two secret primes is classically believed to be hard. Try it yourself in the RSA Laboratory above.
Open the RSA Laboratory →1994
Shor's algorithm breaks the assumption
Peter Shor, at AT&T Bell Labs, publishes a quantum algorithm that factors integers in polynomial time -- turning "factoring is hard" from a load-bearing assumption into a statement that is only true against classical computers. The exact pipeline this project simulates.
Run Shor's Algorithm Laboratory →2001
First experimental demonstration
Researchers at IBM and Stanford run Shor's algorithm on a 7-qubit NMR quantum computer, factoring 15 = 3 x 5 -- proof the algorithm works on real (if tiny) hardware, not just on paper. This project's own Shor's Lab defaults to that exact same N.
Read this project's own hardware validation notes →2016
NIST opens the post-quantum competition
NIST calls for candidate algorithms designed to resist both classical and quantum attack -- work starting well ahead of any quantum computer actually capable of running Shor's algorithm on production-sized keys, precisely because migrating cryptographic infrastructure takes years.
2024
The first post-quantum standards ship
NIST finalizes FIPS 203, 204, and 205 -- RSA's eventual successors, already in production use before a fault-tolerant quantum computer capable of factoring real RSA key sizes exists. See Security & Limitations for exactly how far current hardware still is from that day.
Read Security & Limitations →2026
Where this actually stands right now
The best published estimate for factoring a real RSA-2048 key still stands at 1,000,000 noisy physical qubits (Gidney, 2025) -- the largest gate-model chip publicly announced has 1,121 (IBM's Condor, 2023), about 3.0 orders of magnitude short. Every lab on this site runs the real mechanism; none of them run it at that scale.
See the full resource-estimate gap →Every algorithm named above is the real thing running elsewhere on this site -- not a description of it.