Robust and efficient quantum-safe HTTPS

99 points23 comments2 days ago
utopiah

FWIW if you want to tinker on the topic I recommend OQS https://github.com/open-quantum-safe/ including Chromium, Apache, nginx, curl, etc. It's quite fun to play with.

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kro

The title is vague, my first thought was "We already have MLKEM". Which is enough against passive attackers.

The article apparently is about the CA/certs for authenticating the server, a part of HTTPS

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boutell

The pivot to MTC is a big change in the infrastructure of https. I wish other browsers were at least mentioned in this blog post. I'm curious about the future of letsencrypt as well.

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Veserv

While I appreciate more efficient and compact representations, I fail to see why this is particularly necessary. This article [1] on the same topic indicates a naive PQ chain is only ~40x the size of a current 4 KB chain. That means it is just ~160 KB.

If you have the legal minimum to be considered broadband in the US, you need ~100 Mbps, so that would add ~12 ms.

If you can stream one 4K video, you need ~20-40 Mbps, so that would add ~30-60 ms.

If you can stream one 1080p video you need to ~3-6 Mbps, so that would add ~200-400 ms.

Even on just a 1 Mbps connection, just barely enough to stream a single 480p video that would only add ~1 second.

And I doubt the weight of most of pages is lower than 160 KB. Many of them are probably dramatically higher, so the total effect of a extra 160 KB is just a few percent.

If there is a problem, it seems like it would be with poorly designed protocols and infrastructure which should be fixed as well instead of papering them over.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/02/google-is-using-cle...

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