Schneier had a less breathless account a few days ago: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/08/nists-post-qu...
Also, Schneier's site doesn't have me agree to tracking without any possibility of rejection ;)
“Quantum-Safe” Crypto Hacked by 10-Year-Old PC
31–40 of 187 posts
Re: “Quantum-Safe” Crypto Hacked by 10-Year-Old PC
#32I look forward to this being in the next set of cryptopals.
It's a little unlikely. It's a code-able exploit with a big payoff, which is right in the wheelhouse, but then there's this that Steven Galbraith had to say about how the exploit works: *What is this magic ingredient?* It is a theorem by Ernst Kani about reducible subgroups of abelian surfaces. *Is there a simple way to explain the magic ingredient?* Nope. Go learn about Richelot isogenies and abelian surfaces. As I…
Even before being broken, the abstruse mathematics is one of the reasons to not go with SIKE or Rainbow. It’s not surprising they are broken.
NTRU is the easiest of the NIST PQC finalists to understand, and will probably beat Kyber because even a relatively new-to-cryptography programmer will be able to understand it and implement it.
Re: “Quantum-Safe” Crypto Hacked by 10-Year-Old PC
#33You KNOW they first had to do this in the normal way (large scale, distributed servers)..... and cracked it in like a second. Then for grins, the engineer HAD to say "I wonder if I could do this on my old Mac mini". And it worked. And for embarrassment of the original design, the story, and clickbait... they did it on that old machine
Why would you know that?
They used an Intel Xeon CPU E5-2630v2, it's in the paper. What if in the process of crafting the attack on their old workstation PC they found that it was seemingly possible to do low key sizes very quickly and scaled up from there to a practical attack. Or maybe they have quite the competency in Mathematics and realized their attack was not that computationally expensive.
>Ran on a single core, the appended Magma code breaks the Microsoft SIKE challenges $IKEp182 and $IKEp217 in about 4 minutes and 6 minutes, respectively. A run on the SIKEp434 parameters, previously believed to meet NIST’s quantum security level 1, took about 62 minutes, again on a single core. We also ran the code on random instances of SIKEp503 (level 2), SIKEp610 (level 3) and SIKEp751 (level 5), which took about 2h19m, 8h15m and 20h37m, respectively.
Re: “Quantum-Safe” Crypto Hacked by 10-Year-Old PC
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a little unlikely. It's a code-able exploit with a big payoff, which is right in the wheelhouse, but then there's this that Steven Galbraith had to say about how the exploit works: *What is this magic ingredient?* It is a theorem by Ernst Kani about reducible subgroups of abelian surfaces. *Is there a simple way to explain the magic ingredient?* Nope. Go learn about Richelot isogenies and abelian surfaces. As I…
Even before being broken, the abstruse mathematics is one of the reasons to not go with SIKE or Rainbow. It’s not surprising they are broken. NTRU is the easiest of the NIST PQC finalists to understand, and will probably beat Kyber because even a relatively new-to-cryptography programmer will be able to understand it and implement it.
You can see why people love it, though; the nuts and bolts of SIDH are extremely elegant. Like, it's a neat trick. I don't understand Richelot isogenies and abelian surfaces and can't speak to the elegance of the break; it's the break that exceeds the threshold for "abstruse" (of course, the abstruse mathematics of things that break cryptosystems do make the underlying cryptosystem abstruse! you have to grok them to use it!)
Re: “Quantum-Safe” Crypto Hacked by 10-Year-Old PC
#35Schneier had a less breathless account a few days ago: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/08/nists-post-qu...
He's wrong about the "cryptographic agility" stuff, at least the way he's framed it. But then, another place where I'd part company with him is about the urgency for getting PQC slotted into real-world systems.
Re: “Quantum-Safe” Crypto Hacked by 10-Year-Old PC
#36I wonder if someday we will see someone generating all the bitcoins on a laptop. How the article says, the math behind most cryptosystems were never proven to be unbreakable, it is just believed to be so, because no one managed to show otherwise.
That's the one actual value of bitcoin / cryptocurrencies: we can be fairly sure that no one broke the used hashing algorithms (1). The valuation of these coins is such that not just any individual, but even a state actor would just go for it. (1) to such a degree that it would allow the attacker to create new blocks at will. Assume 1 bitcoin is $50k; break it only once a day and make over 15 million × block reward a…
Not at all...
I mean if you break either the hash or the signature, then there are bigger fish to fry than just Bitcoin. You'd essentially be on your way to breaking much of the crypto used to secure significantly more valuable information -- the kind of information you measure with human lives rather than dollars.
Actually, if you (or more likely a nation state actor) did break either the hash or signature, you'd be crazy to reveal that fact on something as trivial as Bitcoin. That'd be like breaking ENIGMA and just using it to publish the German weather reports lol.
Re: “Quantum-Safe” Crypto Hacked by 10-Year-Old PC
#37sort of offtopic but it reminds me of the first auto shop I worked in. I just got certified on a new laser alignment tool and had a chip on my shoulder for almost a week, until an old timer manually dialed in an alignment that checked out perfect on my shiny new gizmo. I'd never felt so humbled in my life and spent that whole summer practicing manual alignments.
Re: “Quantum-Safe” Crypto Hacked by 10-Year-Old PC
#38Well, it's Quantum-Safe, not Turing-Safe
Re: “Quantum-Safe” Crypto Hacked by 10-Year-Old PC
#39Schneier had a less breathless account a few days ago: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2022/08/nists-post-qu...
He's wrong about the "cryptographic agility" stuff, at least the way he's framed it. But then, another place where I'd part company with him is about the urgency for getting PQC slotted into real-world systems.
Why do you think he's wrong? He's essentially saying IT systems need to be designed with the expectation that cryptographic algorithms will be attacked and may need to be replaced, as I understand it.
Re: “Quantum-Safe” Crypto Hacked by 10-Year-Old PC
#40[deleted]