Security News > 2023 > September > Signal adopts new alphabet jumble to protect chats from quantum computers

Signal has adopted a new key agreement protocol in an effort to keep encrypted Signal chat messages protected from any future quantum computers.

Quantum computers - which every decade experts believe may be able to crack today's encryption schemes within the next decade or two - aren't particularly useful at the moment.

"Although quantum computers already exist, the systems known to exist today do not yet have enough qubits to pose a threat to the public-key cryptography that Signal currently uses," noted Ehren Kret, chief technology officer at Signal, in a write-up.

A recent preprint paper from Oded Regev, a New York University computer science professor, has proposed a quantum factoring algorithm that is claimed to be more efficient than the one proposed by Peter Shor.

Signal, consistently mentioned alongside WhatsApp as probably the best choice for secure chat messaging, is upgrading its X3DH specification to PQXDH. "With this upgrade, we are adding a layer of protection against the threat of a quantum computer being built in the future that is powerful enough to break current encryption standards," said Kret.

For scenarios in which a quantum computer is actively intercepting and eavesdropping chat comms, further mitigations are anticipated.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/09/20/signal_adopts_new_alphabet_jumble/