Google Launches Quantum‑Proof HTTPS, Redefining Web Security for 2026

Google’s engineers rolled out the new protocol in Chrome’s stable channel this week, embedding a custom‑built Merkle‑tree certificate format that can reconstruct the full post‑quantum key exchange from a 64‑byte seed. The approach, detailed in an Ars Technica report, leverages deterministic key‑derivation on both client and server so that the bulky 2.5 KB of lattice‑based material never traverses the wire (Ars Technica, 2025). By compressing the handshake payload by roughly 97 %, Google eliminates the latency spike that earlier post‑quantum proposals threatened to impose on every HTTPS connection. Early benchmarks from Google’s internal testing show a sub‑millisecond increase in TLS handshake time compared with today’s classical RSA/ECDSA handshakes, a figure that is effectively invisible to end users.

The timing of the launch is driven by a shifting threat landscape. In the past twelve months, Google, IBM, and Microsoft have each announced quantum processors that surpass the 100‑qubit threshold and demonstrate error‑corrected operations for longer than a microsecond (Trendplus, 2025). While still far from the millions of qubits needed to run Shor’s algorithm at scale, cryptographers warn that “harvest‑now, decrypt‑later” attacks are already viable: adversaries can record encrypted traffic today and wait for quantum hardware to catch up (Trendplus, 2025). The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has already standardized several post‑quantum algorithms, and the industry is scrambling to retrofit TLS‑1.3 with those primitives. Google’s compression trick sidesteps the biggest practical obstacle—bandwidth and latency overhead—allowing the web to adopt NIST‑approved schemes without a wholesale performance penalty.

From a deployment standpoint, the change is largely transparent to site operators. The new handshake is negotiated via a TLS extension that signals support for the “Quantum‑Proof” mode; servers that have updated their OpenSSL or BoringSSL stacks will automatically present the compressed certificate, while legacy browsers fall back to the classic handshake (Ars Technica, 2025). Because the compressed payload is derived from a deterministic Merkle tree, certificate authorities can continue to issue traditional X.509 certificates, merely adding the extra tree nodes to the certificate chain. Google’s blog post, referenced by The Verge, confirms that the rollout will be phased: Chrome 119 will enable the feature by default for all users, and the server‑side support is expected to reach 80 % of the top‑million sites within six months.

Security analysts see the move as a decisive step toward “quantum‑ready” internet infrastructure. Forbes notes that NIST’s recent post‑quantum announcement has already spurred a wave of TLS‑compatible libraries, but the real hurdle has been the sheer size of the keys and signatures (Forbes, 2025). By shrinking the data to a fraction of its original footprint, Google removes the economic disincentive for content delivery networks and mobile carriers that worry about increased bandwidth costs. The protocol also preserves forward secrecy: each session still generates fresh ephemeral keys that are derived from the compressed material, ensuring that even if a future quantum computer cracks the underlying lattice problem, past sessions remain protected.

The broader industry reaction is cautiously optimistic. While the compression technique is proprietary to Google’s codebase, the underlying mathematics has been published in a pre‑print on the Cryptology ePrint Archive, allowing other browser vendors to implement compatible versions (Ars Technica, 2025). Mozilla’s security lead, speaking to The Verge, said the team is evaluating the approach and expects to ship support in Firefox 124. If the ecosystem converges on the 64‑byte handshake, the web could achieve a practical quantum‑resistant baseline well before 2026, the year many experts predict quantum computers will become a credible threat to RSA‑2048. For now, Google’s quantum‑proof HTTPS marks the most concrete step yet toward that horizon, turning what was once a theoretical vulnerability into a solved engineering problem.