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“Quantum-Safe” Crypto Hacked by 10-Year-Old PC

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11–20 of 187 posts

Re: “Quantum-Safe” Crypto Hacked by 10-Year-Old PC

#13
If you'd like to hear someone who can barely do long division† discuss this vulnerability with one of the leading isogeny cryptographer researchers and the world's most isogeny-enthusiastic cryptography engineer, have I got a podcast for you:

https://securitycryptographywhatever.buzzsprout.com/1822302/...

There's even a transcript, if you want to read things like:

So I watched the, uh, I watched Costello's tutorial, like the, the broadcast he did for, um, for Microsoft. And I kind of worked my way through the, the tutorial paper. So like, is it, is it true that like, in sort of the same sense we're...

Looks back and forth around the room furtively

Re: “Quantum-Safe” Crypto Hacked by 10-Year-Old PC

#14
post #7

so the cynical view here would be that the backdoor was discovered before the algorithm could get widely deployed?

My super cynical view is that the whole genre of "quantum safe" cryptography is being promoted to try and encourage adoption of weak encryption...

Its felt like FUD based on FUD for a while.

Not that I really trust traditional encryption that much either.

There wouldn't be so much effort going into bridging air gapped systems if even traditional encryption could be trusted...

Hate making cynical comments tho, they always seem to get down voted :( like being cynical when it comes to encryption is a bad thing.....

Re: “Quantum-Safe” Crypto Hacked by 10-Year-Old PC

#16
post #2

"To me what is most surprising is that the attack seemingly came out of nowhere,” says cryptographer Jonathan Katz at the University of Maryland at College Park, who did not take part in this new work. “There were very few prior results showing any weaknesses in SIKE, and then suddenly this result appeared with a completely devastating attack—namely, it finds the entire secret key, and does so relatively quickly with…

The funny bit about this is that the principles that broke SIDH were in the literature --- they owe to a late-1990's theorem† by Ernst Kani, a mathematician in Ontario. We spoke to Steven Galbraith about this (I wouldn't know who Kani was if I hadn't read Galbraith, just to be clear) and he'd even talked to Kani long before any of this came out. But Kani isn't a cryptographer and apparently isn't even especially interested in cryptography, so the dots didn't get connected until much later.

That's the "25-year-old theorem" from the article.

Re: “Quantum-Safe” Crypto Hacked by 10-Year-Old PC

#19

It was designed by engineers to be quantum resistant without enough deference to mathematicians who could see that it was not resistant to more conventional approaches.

That is true only in the banal sense that any number-theoretic crypto break can be attributed to paying insufficient attention to mathematical research, but isn't true in any useful sense, since a small army of mathematicians worked on isogeny Diffie-Hellman.

Re: “Quantum-Safe” Crypto Hacked by 10-Year-Old PC

#20

It was designed by engineers to be quantum resistant without enough deference to mathematicians who could see that it was not resistant to more conventional approaches.

It was designed by a mathematician and broken by the mathematical community.
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