Quantum computing is threatening to blow up the encryption that protects internet communications and lets you do things like shop online without thieves stealing your credit card number. Now internet infrastructure company Cloudflare has joined an effort to come up with new “post-quantum” algorithms that’ll extend today’s security protections.
Cloudflare has begun testing new encryption technology in partnership with Google Chrome to try to figure out what’s most practical in the real world. And it’s released an open-source software package called CIRCL -the Cloudflare Interoperable Reusable Cryptographic Library to let it and anyone else evaluate post-quantum encryption progress.
While Cloudflare hasn’t solved the problems that cryptography raises for encryption, it’s been trying to “quantum-proof” TLS, the encryption technology formerly called SSL, which protects connections between web browsers and servers. Cloudflare plans to continue this work, and it hopes that by sharing CIRCL, it will help other researchers prepare for a post-quantum world. In a blog post, the company wrote, “we are trying to improve and propose standards to help make the internet a better place.”
“We hope that this experiment helps choose an algorithm with the best characteristics for the future of the internet,” Cloudflare cryptography developer Kris Kwiatkowski said in a blog post.
