Cloudflare wants to protect the internet from quantum computing
Quantum computing has the potential to revolutionize health care, AI, financial modeling, weather simulation and more. It’s also going to shake up encryption as we know it. Without advances in post-quantum cryptography, quantum computing could make it easy for hackers to access sensitive data, like credit card info. To prevent that, internet infrastructure company Cloudflare is testing post-quantum cryptography technology, and it’s sharing its open-source software package, CIRCL, or Cloudflare Interoperable Reusable Cryptographic Library, on GitHub.
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.”
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