The capabilities of quantum computing, in theory, are pretty well known. There's basically a few extra operations which can be done efficiently on it and so that can be built into the threat model, even if no-one's built a quantum computer yet.

(Of course, basically all encryption, especially asymmetric encryption, is predicated on there not being some as-yet-undiscovered exploitable structure to the mathematics on which it is built. Modern cryptography, AFAIK, tends to have some decent arguments for why this is not expected to be the case, but it's never completely proven top-to-bottom outside of fairly niche/trivial cases. It's always in principle possible that someone discovers an attack on these new algorithms, classical or quantum)

It's essentially the laws of physics. To oversimplify, Quantum computing can essentially do certain kinds of operations extremely fast (like factoring prime numbers) because it can calculate all the permutations almost instantly. But if you add intentional complexity to it in ways that all those states can't be "seen" then the quantum computer falls flat. That's one of the issues with adding post-quantum algorithms, they're by design less efficient in certain ways, meaning slower and/or with more overhead.

The way a quantum mechanics PhD explained it to me years ago in layman's terms is similar to nuclear science. We "knew" that a nuclear explosion was possible before a bomb was created and what conditions it would work. The Nagasaki bomb was a completely different type of bomb than the trinity test and Hirosima, plutonium instead of uranium, and it was never even tested before it's first use!

By this standard, there is no current encryption method (except for pre-shared one time pads when used correctly) that is known to be unbreakable. For example, it is not proven that prime factoring can't be done much more efficiently on a classical computer - for all we know, it's possible that tomorrow someone will come up with a novel algorithm that can break RSA in just a small number of operations. Same is true for elyptic curves - we don't have any mathematical proof that it's impossible for a much better algorithm than the currently known ones is possible.

However, just like for RSA we know that the problem of efficient integer factoring has been worked on for a long time with no progress, the same is true for quantum computing. We have been trying to figure out quantum algorithms for a great number of problems that are hard for classical computers for a long time now, and we haven't been able to, except for the ones that we have. Mathematicians have also developed certain intuitions for which problems have characteristics that make them potentially easier to solve on a QC and which don't.

In general, just like with P=NP?, we haven't proven yet if BQP, roughly the class of problems which have efficient QC versions, is equal or not to P, the class of problems that can be efficiently solved on a classical computer; and we also don't know if BQP=NP.

So yes, there is at least a theoretical possibility that the problems used for creating post-quantum encryption will turn out to be in BQP, will turn out to have an efficient quantum algorithm that solves them. But that would come from mathematical research, it is entirely unrelated to creating and tinkering with actual quantum computers. The math of quantum algorithms is currently far ahead of the engineering and physics on building the actual computers.

In addition to the other fine answers, I personally find the additional operations that quantum computers enable to be surprisingly inapplicable to a lot of real problems. It's really kind of unimpressive when you dig down into it. It is not a revolution of computing as we know it, it's a very, very expensive accelerator card for a few niche problems. Neat for people who have those problems. But if "cracking cryptography" wasn't one of those problems I'm not sure it would have the popular attention it does.

I think there is a sense in which we have a historical accident that has make quantum computers sound bigger than they are, in that we ended up with "factoring prime numbers" being the first thing we had to make practical encryption out of, and by what is from a human perspective mostly a coincidence, it so happens that quantum computers may be really good at that. But the problem is that quantum computers happen to be good at factorizing that is the problem, not that quantum computers are somehow "good at breaking encryption". It seams to me that in some sense "post-quantum computing" is actually "all practical encryption schemes except those based on factoring large numbers". Breaking large prime number-based schemes is the exception that QC happens to be good at, not the rule.

To answer your "if it's possible at all" question: it's full of hard engineering problems, but none of it looks unsolvable, and the investments are there.

And even if there was only a 10% chance of QC breaking crypto, the community is not comfortable with a 10% chance of such a catastrophic scenario.

This is part of my day job, so here's another interesting fact: for migrating encryption use cases, you have to consider that attackers can capture your encrypted data today to break in the future. So, as a rule of thumb, your migration timeline is much shorter for encryption than for signatures.

The problem is perhaps more theoretical than you might think. The security of post-quantum schemes basically comes down to the fact that researchers have thought long and hard about whether there are efficient classical or quantum algorithms to solve a given problem, and haven't found any yet. That's not necessarily anything new. Even RSA is predicated on no one having a fast factorisation algorithm.

I guess how technology and policy paths are layed out? It is basically a wish list. Like we already have the spec for 7G mobile comms decades ahead …(https://www.techsciresearch.com/blog/5g-vs-6g-vs-7g-unveilin... )

Well similar to how turing machines are a sufficient theoretical model to make all kinds of arguments about runtime complexity of classical computers without relying on their actual physical implementation, we have theoretical models for the way we are approaching quantum computation that do the same thing (Namely the quantum circuit model)

These are/will be the fundamentals of quantum logic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_logic_gate