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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.
It's not really fair to call what a quantum computer does "computational power", is it? If you factor N by trying all the integers greater than one and smaller than M= floor( square root ( N ) ), you will eventually find the answer, and the more computational power you have, the faster you can race from 2 to M. Using Shor's algorithm on a quantum machine, you don't actually end up doing all of the intervening computation, but you do get the answer. But that doesn't mean you can automatically take any set of problems and "solve them all at once", because that isn't really what is happening. It's not computational power in that sense, right?
"security of the entire internet." The author of this nugget doesn't know, apparently, that the Internet was never designed to be secure, and any attempt to make it so will inevitably fail. The Internet was designed to facilitate the OPEN exchange of information.
Who cares about the security of the Internet per se? Peak and tamper with the tunnels as much as you want, so long as the data is encrypted and signed then it makes no difference.
A secure line needs to be physically secured and controlled and carry traffic directly from A to B only.
Nonsense. The entire point of modern public key cryptosystems is to allow secure communication over non-secure links. This secure channel can even be established without private key exchange - hence the name.