Chip makers are baking post-quantum cryptography acceleration into hardware as the threat of quantum systems breaking current encryption rises.
The technology is still years away from the general market, but defenders are concerned about harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks that could build up stores of data until quantum computing becomes more widely available to exploit it. Security professionals and regulators encourage organizations to begin future-proofing now, and some key players are acting.
"You don't want to be stuck in the harvest now, decrypt later kind of attacks, because the time is not three years out, the time is now," Anand Pashupathy, vice president and general manager for product assurance and security at Intel, said during April's Google Cloud Next conference.
Intel has started providing "PQC capable support" in Xeon 6 server hardware chips to protect against attacks from quantum computers, Pashupathy said.