Google Just Quietly Changed How the Internet Protects Your Data
In a development that security researchers are calling one of the most significant advances in cryptographic engineering in years, Google has successfully quantum-proofed HTTPS — the protocol that secures virtually every website you visit — by compressing 2.5 kilobytes of post-quantum cryptographic data into just 64 bytes. According to a detailed report by Ars Technica published this week, the achievement addresses one of the most pressing practical barriers to deploying next-generation encryption at scale across the web.
The stakes could hardly be higher. Quantum computers, which exploit the principles of quantum mechanics to perform calculations exponentially faster than classical machines, are widely expected by cryptographers to eventually render today's standard encryption algorithms obsolete. The question facing the security community has never been whether post-quantum cryptography is necessary — it is — but rather how to deploy it without breaking the internet in the process.
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The Core Problem: Size Matters in HTTPS
To understand why this compression achievement matters, it helps to understand how HTTPS works. When your browser connects to a secure website, the two parties perform a TLS handshake — a rapid exchange of cryptographic credentials that establishes a secure, authenticated channel. This handshake has historically been efficient, adding minimal overhead to connection times.
Post-quantum cryptographic algorithms, however, are fundamentally larger than their classical counterparts. The keys and signatures required to resist attacks from quantum computers can run to several kilobytes — a seemingly small number until you consider that this overhead is applied to every single HTTPS connection made by every browser, on every device, across the entire internet, billions of times per day. According to the Ars Technica report, the raw data size for post-quantum key exchanges was landing around 2.5 kilobytes, a figure that threatened to meaningfully slow connection establishment times and create bottlenecks at scale.
Google's engineers found a way to squeeze that 2.5kB footprint down to just 64 bytes — roughly a 97% reduction in size — without sacrificing the mathematical security properties that make post-quantum cryptography resistant to quantum attacks. The technique, according to reports, involves compressing the cryptographic material in a way that allows it to be reconstructed on the other end without transmitting the full data payload with every handshake.
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Why Quantum Threats Are No Longer Theoretical
For years, quantum computing remained largely a laboratory curiosity — powerful in theory but practically limited by the difficulty of maintaining stable quantum states, known as qubit coherence. That picture has changed significantly. According to reports from across the technology press in recent months, major players including Google, IBM, and Microsoft have each demonstrated increasingly capable quantum systems, with capabilities expanding rapidly year over year.
Cryptographers have long warned about a scenario called "harvest now, decrypt later" — in which adversaries, including nation-state actors, intercept and store encrypted internet traffic today with the intention of decrypting it once sufficiently powerful quantum computers become available. This makes the transition to post-quantum cryptography urgent even before a cryptographically-relevant quantum computer exists publicly, because data being transmitted today may still be sensitive years from now.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) finalized its first set of post-quantum cryptographic standards in 2024, a move that set the official framework for what algorithms should replace current standards. Google's compression work addresses the practical deployment challenge that those standards left open: how to actually integrate these larger algorithms into the existing infrastructure of the web without degrading user experience.
- NIST's finalized post-quantum standards established the algorithms the industry must adopt
- Harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks make immediate migration urgent for sensitive data
- TLS handshake overhead had been identified as a key bottleneck for post-quantum deployment
- Google Chrome is already a primary testing ground for post-quantum TLS experiments
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What This Means for Websites, Developers, and Everyday Users
For the vast majority of internet users, Google's compression breakthrough will, if successfully deployed, be entirely invisible — which is precisely the point. The goal is a seamless transition from classical to post-quantum cryptography that happens in the background, without users needing to do anything, update any software manually, or experience noticeably slower page loads.
For web developers and security engineers, the implications are more concrete. Deployment of post-quantum TLS at scale has been held back in part by concerns about the bandwidth and latency costs described above. If Google's approach can be standardized and adopted across major browsers and server infrastructure, it removes one of the key practical objections to accelerating that migration timeline.
Google has historically used Chrome as a proving ground for emerging web security standards. The company previously ran large-scale experiments with an earlier post-quantum algorithm, KYBER (later standardized by NIST as ML-KEM), in Chrome connections, gathering real-world data on performance impacts. According to past reporting, those experiments revealed that some network middleboxes — hardware sitting between clients and servers in corporate and carrier networks — behaved unexpectedly when they encountered unfamiliar large cryptographic payloads, causing connection failures. The compression work reported this week may help sidestep some of those compatibility issues as well.
For businesses and enterprises, particularly those handling sensitive financial, medical, or government data, the signal from Google is clear: post-quantum migration is no longer a distant future concern. Organizations that have not begun assessing their cryptographic dependencies — a process sometimes called cryptographic agility auditing — are being urged by security professionals to start now.
The Broader Race to Quantum-Safe Internet Infrastructure
Google is not alone in working on this problem. According to reports, Cloudflare, which handles a significant portion of global internet traffic, has also been experimenting with post-quantum TLS deployments. Apple has introduced post-quantum protections in its iMessage protocol, specifically citing harvest-now-decrypt-later concerns. Signal, the encrypted messaging app, upgraded its protocol to include post-quantum key agreement in 2024.
The internet's transition to post-quantum cryptography is expected to be a multi-year, multi-stakeholder effort involving browser makers, server software maintainers, certificate authorities, and network hardware vendors. Google's compression achievement, according to analysts reviewing the Ars Technica report, represents meaningful progress on one of the technically gnarliest pieces of that puzzle — making it feasible to deploy robust quantum-resistant encryption without asking the internet to absorb significant performance penalties.
For now, the implementation remains a research and engineering achievement, with broader standardization and deployment timelines yet to be confirmed publicly. But in the world of cryptographic infrastructure, where changes move slowly precisely because the stakes are so high, this week's news from Google is being noted as a genuine step forward.
Key Takeaways
- Google compressed post-quantum HTTPS data from 2.5kB to 64 bytes, a ~97% reduction
- The achievement removes a major practical barrier to deploying quantum-safe encryption at web scale
- The threat driving this work — quantum computers breaking current encryption — is increasingly near-term
- Harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks make the transition urgent even before powerful quantum computers arrive publicly
- Broader deployment will require coordination across browsers, servers, and network infrastructure
Frequently Asked Questions
What did Google achieve with quantum-proofing HTTPS?
According to Ars Technica, Google's engineers found a way to compress post-quantum cryptographic data from approximately 2.5 kilobytes down to just 64 bytes — about a 97% reduction. This makes it far more practical to deploy quantum-resistant encryption across the web without slowing down connections.
Why does post-quantum cryptography matter right now if quantum computers aren't powerful enough yet?
Security researchers warn about 'harvest now, decrypt later' attacks, where adversaries collect encrypted data today and store it until quantum computers become powerful enough to break the encryption. This means sensitive data transmitted now could be at risk in the future, making the transition to post-quantum standards urgent.
How does this affect everyday internet users?
For most users, the transition should be completely invisible if Google's compression approach is successfully standardized and deployed. The goal is for browsers and websites to automatically use quantum-safe encryption in the background, with no action required from users and no noticeable impact on page load speeds.
What is NIST's role in post-quantum cryptography?
The National Institute of Standards and Technology finalized its first set of post-quantum cryptographic standards in 2024, establishing which algorithms should replace current encryption methods. Google's compression work addresses the practical challenge of deploying those NIST-approved algorithms at internet scale.
Is Google the only company working on quantum-safe internet security?
No. According to reports, Cloudflare has also been testing post-quantum TLS deployments, Apple introduced post-quantum protections in iMessage, and Signal upgraded its protocol in 2024. The transition to quantum-safe internet infrastructure is a broad, industry-wide effort involving many organizations.
