Keeper Security Launches Quantum-Resistant Encryption
Cybersecurity firm Keeper Security has introduced quantum-resistant encryption into its enterprise security platform. The move is designed to protect customer data against future threats from quantum computers, which are expected to be capable of breaking current encryption standards. This preemptive upgrade addresses the long-term risk of "harvest now, decrypt later" attacks.
- Keeper has specifically integrated the CRYSTALS-Kyber algorithm, a key encapsulation mechanism selected by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as a post-quantum cryptography standard. - The "harvest now, decrypt later" threat is a strategy where adversaries collect and store encrypted data today, intending to decrypt it years in the future once quantum computers are capable of breaking current encryption standards like RSA and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). - This move aligns with a broader push from NIST, which has set a timeline to deprecate widely used but quantum-vulnerable algorithms by 2030 and to disallow their use entirely after 2035. - Keeper's existing security architecture is built on a zero-trust and zero-knowledge model, where data is encrypted and decrypted locally on the user's device using methods like AES-256 and Elliptic Curve Cryptography. The new quantum-resistant algorithm is being added as another layer of security. - The U.S. government is driving this transition through directives like the White House National Security Memorandum 10 (NSM-10), which mandates the migration of federal systems to post-quantum cryptography by 2035. - Current public-key encryption systems, used for everything from online banking to email, primarily rely on the difficulty of mathematical problems that are expected to be easily solvable by a sufficiently powerful quantum computer running Shor's algorithm.
