Safeguarding Chrome from quantum computers
Posted By RichC on July 8, 2016
Will Internet transactions be secure when relatively affordable quantum computers show up? Google is not taking chances and is working on their Chrome browser now (according to The Verge).
Google is working on safeguarding Chrome against the potential threat of quantum computers, the company announced today. It’s doing so by implementing post-quantum cryptography in an experimental version of the browser. While there exist hardware defenses against the vastly superior computing power of quantum machines, Google is using a new so-called post-quantum key-exchange algorithm. This software, called the New Hope algorithm, is enabled in Chrome Canary, a kind of testing ground for new browser technology, on only a small number of connections between the browser and Google servers.
Although quantum computers of this variety are only small and experimental at this stage, Google is taking precautions for the worst case scenario. “While they will, no doubt, be of huge benefit in some areas of study, some of the problems that they [quantum computers] are effective at solving are the ones that we use to secure digital communications,” writes Matt Braithwaite, a Google software engineer, in a blog post. “Specifically, if large quantum computers can be built then they may be able to break the asymmetric cryptographic primitives that are currently used in TLS, the security protocol behind HTTPS.” In other words, quantum computers could undermine the security of the entire internet.
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