India, Oct. 3 -- Picture locking your office door at the end of the day and walking home certain it will hold. Now imagine someone photographs that lock today, planning to cut a working key once better tools exist. That is roughly where Indian enterprises stand with public-key encryption. RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) protect bank transactions, hospital records, and government identity systems, all secure against today's computers but not necessarily tomorrow's quantum computers. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer running Shor's and Grover's algorithms could undermine that security, and the conversation has moved out of physics journals and into CIO and CISO briefings worldwide.

Nobody knows precisely, but the estimates...