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Google Is Working To Safeguard Chrome From Quantum Computers (theverge.com)
Quantum computing could potentially someday be used to retroactively break any communications that were encrypted with today's standard encryption algorithms. Google realizes this, and hence, is ensuring that it doesn't happen. Today, it announced that it has begun to deploy a new type of cryptography called the New Hope algorithm in its Chrome Canary browser that is designed to prevent such decryption attacks. From a report on The Verge: 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. Quantum computers promise computational power far exceeding today's standards by taking advantage of the underpinning physics discipline. So the presence of a hypothetical future quantum computer, Braithwaite adds, puts at risk any and all encrypted internet communication past or present. It's unclear how secure New Hope (PDF) will prove to be for Chrome, and Braithwaite admits it could be less secure than its existing encryption. But Google says New Hope -- developed by researchers Erdem Alkim, Leo Ducas, Thomas Poppelmann and Peter Schwabe -- was the most promising of all post-quantum key-exchange software it looked into last year.
The nature of the internet is such that communications are routed over lines you physically don't control.
That is insecure on two fronts.
You neither have control over the pipe nor what the router at the end of it does.
A secure communications network requires physical control over the transmission medium and a direct connection for each path. No dynamic routing. Switching may be used if you control and verify each switch and guarantee a single, direct, unshared path each time you communicate.
Phones used to be switched this way - there was a physical switch board and you would get a direct connection to the person on the other end. Of course, you had to trust the physical line and the operator. Phones quickly started sharing lines, though because it was simply impossible to have 1 line for each call during times of heavy use. (You'd get the ol' "All lines are busy at the moment.")
But the concept of a hard line or a secure line still persists today.
Layering encryption on top of an unsecured line and that is dynamically routed/switched and co-mingles signals from others doesn't make the internet a secure communication medium.
Secure enough for most things, yes. Until that encryption is broken or the implementation has back doors built into it or flaws discovered.