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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Google is planning ahead for the death of many encryption algorithms [techcrunch.com] by experimenting with post-quantum cryptography [wikipedia.org] in its alpha/"Canary" [google.com] version of Google Chrome:

If quantum computing ever lives up to its promise (and that's still a big 'if' at this stage), somebody could use this technology to retroactively break any communications that were encrypted with today's standard encryption algorithms. To guard against this, Google today announced [googleblog.com] that it will now start experimenting using post-quantum algorithms to encrypt the connections between the experimental Canary version of Chrome [google.com] and some of its services.

To be clear, this is only an experiment for now and only a small number of connections between the browser and Google's servers will use this new algorithm. The idea here, though, is to bring this idea to the forefront now and "gain real-world experience with the larger data structures that post-quantum algorithms will likely require," as Google engineer Matt Braithwaite [linkedin.com] writes in today's announcement. [...] Specifically, the team is using the New Hope algorithm [iacr.org], which was designed for providing post-quantum security for TLS — the protocol that makes HTTPS secure.

You can check to see if the algorithm is being used on certain domains by opening up the Security Panel developer tool [google.com] and looking for "CECPQ1" next to "Key Exchange".

TechCrunch also reported on a post-quantum cryptography startup which recently raised $10.3 million in funding [techcrunch.com].

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