Many companies including Google, Microsoft and IBM are working on “quantum computers” which will dramatically increase computing speed and efficiency. This is still a thing from the future but looks like Google is preparing Chrome for challenges in the quantum computing era.

Quantum computers can in future decrypt information saved in the current modes of encryption. This is the challenge that Google is currently experimenting with on Chrome.

From the blogpost:

However, a hypothetical, future quantum computer would be able to retrospectively decrypt any internet communication that was recorded today, and many types of information need to remain confidential for decades. Thus even the possibility of a future quantum computer is something that we should be thinking about today.

This experiment is currently enabled in Chrome Canary and you can tell whether it’s being used by opening the recently introduced Security Panel and looking for “CECPQ1”, for example on https://play.google.com/store. Not all Google domains will have it enabled and the experiment may appear and disappear a few times if any issues are found.

As the blogpost mentions, this is still in its infancy, but if you are a security researcher or a web developer, this should be a very interesting news for you!

Read more here.