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.

Comments

security of the Internet?

[DogDude]

"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.

Re:security of the Internet?

[LichtSpektren]

"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.

Re:security of the Internet?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

post-quantum

[Anonymous Coward]

Post-Quantum cryptography, but still can't give us an option to disable middle click scrolling on Windows.

fox guarding the chicken coop

[TheGratefulNet]

somehow, I don't fully trust google to safeguard ANY privacy.

I know they have the financial ability to do major work like this, but their results are 100% untrustable, given WHO they are and WHAT they do.

damn. we could use a good ally on the freedom trail; but google will NEVER be it.

Re:fox guarding the chicken coop

[LichtSpektren]

somehow, I don't fully trust google to safeguard ANY privacy.

I know they have the financial ability to do major work like this, but their results are 100% untrustable, given WHO they are and WHAT they do.

damn. we could use a good ally on the freedom trail; but google will NEVER be it.

You're not wrong, but Google's cash cow is that they are the exclusive broker of your personal information to advertisers. So it's in their best interest to keep their services secure, because (a) they don't want you going to some other service that's more secure, (b) they don't want your personal info leaking to somebody else [since its sole value to Google is that they hold it exclusively].

Wha--?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you feel the need to keep repeating this? Do you think doing so will suddenly make it true?

Ever hear of cryptography? Ever hear of IPSec, for example, not to mention the numerous protocols- TLS, PGP, SSH, the Signal protocol, etc. etc. etc.? What about the underlying nature of "the Internet" are you saying makes security layers on top of it "inevitably fail?"

Re:Wha--?

[LichtSpektren]

Secure enough for most things, yes. Until that encryption is broken or the implementation has back doors built into it or flaws discovered.

Yeah, alright, but by that logic, nothing is really secure, because it's only secure *until* some vulnerability is found.

When people talk about "security," they don't mean some Platonic Form that signifies some absolute and eternal protection in all cases. Practically, however, the best modern forms of encryption are reasonably secure enough that you can rely on them, moreso than any kind of physical lock-box.

Re:Wha--?

[Dutch Gun]

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.

I think perhaps you're conflating the transportation mechanism with the content itself. The internet was *designed* to layer different content and protocols on top of simple, insecure, and even *unreliable* transport protocols.

If you're talking about remaining anonymous on the internet, no, we don't yet have a reliable way to do that, because ultimately you need to give someone your IP address to receive content back. If you're talking about securing content transmitted over the internet, then yes, we absolutely have a reliable way to do that - so far as we know.

You neither have control over the pipe nor what the router at the end of it does.

And that doesn't matter at all. I'm perfectly happy to blast my encrypted traffic over the internet or even over the air where anyone can listen to it, because all they'll hear is the initial handshake followed by a whole lot of pseudo-random noise. It sounds like you're saying that you believe you need a secure, dedicated line to secure your traffic. If so, either this means you don't understand how modern encryption works, or you're trying to play the cool pessimist by saying "well, someone could find a flaw" (which is like claiming airline travel is not safe because airplanes occasionally crash). No decent encryption scheme should rely on a secure transportation mechanism, because that's more or less impossible... or at least impractical... with today's technology.

Security isn't a black and white issue, because you can never actually prove something is secure. It's about degrees of confidence that can only be established over time and lots of cryptographers and researchers trying to break said security. At the moment, we have a pretty high degree of confidence in TLS, because we haven't yet seen a single example of anyone breaking it. Unless you think all the government complaining about the internet "going dark" is a false flag operation, that's a pretty good indicator that no one has been able to break modern encryption methods.

Re:A New Hope?

[Megahard]

That's because they are trying to fight The Quantum Menace.

It's not computational power

[cfalcon]

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?

Re:It's not computational power

[cdrudge]

According to media reports and Hollywood, quantum computers will be able to do anything normal computers do instantaneously. Find the last digit of pi, divide by 0, factor N where N = infinity, decrypt any and every unknown encryption algorithm, etc.

Devil you don't know

[WaffleMonster]

The core problem with pushing "post quantum" crypto into production is you are essentially making choices in the blind based exclusively on fear and *baseless* speculation. There is no affirmative evidence of any kind Quantum computers with the capability to crack crypto are even possible let alone expected in the near to medium term.

I can't help but wonder if at least some of those pushing "post quantum" crypto are intentionally making a play to nerf security more than it already is.

There are a million practical things Google could elect to do to improve real world practical security starting with not reading everyone's email to applying TLS-SRP patches to enable secure password authentication to making Android less of a security joke. Time spent on post quantum crap is time not spent addressing actual threats we know for sure exist in the real world.