The Net giant has secured all its certificates with 2,048-bit RSA encryption keys or better, Google security engineer Dan Dulay said in a blog post Monday. Certificates are used to set up encrypted communications between a Web server and Web browser.
That means two things. First, traffic will be harder to decrypt since 1,024-bit keys aren't in use at Google anymore. Second, retiring the 1,024-bit keys means the computing industry can retire the technology altogether by declaring such keys untrustworthy.
Google said it beat its internal end-of-year deadline for the 2,048-bit move. It's also moved to encrypt its internal data transfer between data centers, a move that Yahoo also is making.
In other words, the Net's technology giants are working actively to make surveillance, authorized or not, significantly harder.
There's a lot of work to be done yet, though. Google also supports a standard called "forward secrecy," which uses different keys for different sessions so that decrypting a single message doesn't mean previous messages can likewise be decrypted using the same key. But many other Net giants don't support forward secrecy
SOURCE: cnet
