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I was about to sit down for coffee in Brooklyn with Meredith Whittaker when she started apologizing for the messages blowing up her phone. “Sorry, we’re launching our post-quantum protocol today,” she said while tapping away in—what else—her Signal app.
Whittaker, the president of the Signal Foundation, the nonprofit behind the world’s most heavily encrypted messaging app, came up for air a few minutes later. She explained that while quantum computers capable of breaking Signal’s encryption standards may not exist just yet, the organization is betting that day is not far off. By later that afternoon, her team had officially updated the Signal Protocol with quantum-resistant encryption keys. It was just another day’s battle in the war against what Whittaker called “a global threat to encryption.”
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