Cloudflare plans to issue quantum-safe TLS certificates
The move will be part of a major overhaul of the ecosystem for website authentication.
The move will be part of a major overhaul of the ecosystem for website authentication.
The short version
- Cloudflare said Tuesday it plans to issue quantum-proof TLS certificates, making it one of the first authorities to issue such certificates, which use a form of cryptography that is widely believed to withstand attacks from quantum computers.
- “We are not issuing certificates yet, and it will be a little while before we do,” Cloudflare’s Steve Goldsmith wrote.
- These hierarchical data structures use cryptographic hashes and other math to verify the contents of large amounts of information using a small fraction of their contents.
What happened
The design, which Google and Cloudflare have been testing in limited pilot programs, drops the amount of handshake data to about 40 kilobytes, about the same as is processed now. Once viable, Shor’s algorithm could forge classical encryption signatures and the public keys of certificate logs.
Why it matters
Ultimately, an attacker could forge signed certificate timestamps used to prove to a browser or operating system that a certificate has been registered when it hasn’t.
Summary by Nerd News Network. Read the full article at Ars Technica via the links above and below.