Your risk position

Choosing a horizon

Set the horizon to the year by which anything captured today must have become unreadable. For infrastructure whose secrets must outlive several hardware refresh cycles, or for data whose confidentiality has to survive a decade, that year is further out than a certificate's expiry. Ten years is a common starting point; regulatory obligations for long-lived infrastructure often push it much further.

Choosing the growth rate

No one can defend a single growth rate, which is why this is your input and not the product's. Lower it if you think hardware scales slowly, raise it if you expect a step change. The engine solves for the year capacity reaches the required qubit count rather than asserting a date, so the arithmetic stays inspectable either way.

Base physical qubit count anchored to publicly announced processor sizes (IBM Condor 1,121 qubits, Dec 2023); annual growth is a user-set assumption, not a forecast.

Choosing the cost anchor

Two published estimates exist for factoring RSA-2048, and they differ by a factor of twenty. The newer one is lower, which means earlier break years. Using the newer figure and calling the older one optimistic would not be honest, so both are selectable and the chosen one is recorded on every certificate.

What is not configurable

The Shor circuit costs, the NIST SP 800-57 equivalences and the NIST IR 8547 dates are published constants and stay fixed. Making them adjustable would let a reader tune the model until it produced the answer they wanted, which would make the grade meaningless.