41–50 of 187 posts
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,…
I 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…
And it is likely to be very obvious and public.
You will crash the market, so can't really do that multiple times.
And if you can Crack this there are better targets
sort 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably both yes and no. As of right now bitcoin depends pretty heavily on SHA256 and with hash functions being quite important cryptography primitives, there's always ongoing work on breaking them (tremendous upside to anyone who can manage to break common ones), so it's pretty feasible that eventually it will be broken. (We've already seen the fall of MD5 and SHA-1 in recent-ish years) However, cryptocurrencies ar…
It’s pretty unlikely that sha2 will ever broken in a way which actually has a meaningful security impact to bitcoin, especially considering that almost every value in the system is sha2(sha2()) which nullifies a lot of attacks against hashes which need careful control of the input. Some newer tools in the system use a single hash (it’s unclear why a double one was used in the first place), but all the same it remains…
Because of one of something is good, more is always better. This is how my brother in law cooks, and it's... "flavorful" in a bad way.
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 al…
"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 inte…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably both yes and no. As of right now bitcoin depends pretty heavily on SHA256 and with hash functions being quite important cryptography primitives, there's always ongoing work on breaking them (tremendous upside to anyone who can manage to break common ones), so it's pretty feasible that eventually it will be broken. (We've already seen the fall of MD5 and SHA-1 in recent-ish years) However, cryptocurrencies ar…
It’s pretty unlikely that sha2 will ever broken in a way which actually has a meaningful security impact to bitcoin, especially considering that almost every value in the system is sha2(sha2()) which nullifies a lot of attacks against hashes which need careful control of the input. Some newer tools in the system use a single hash (it’s unclear why a double one was used in the first place), but all the same it remains…
> One reason SIKE’s vulnerability was not detected until now was because the new attack “applies very advanced mathematics—I can’t think of another situation where an attack has used such deep mathematics compared with the system being broken,” says Galbraith. Katz agrees, saying, “I suspect that fewer than 50 people in the world understand both the underlying mathematics and the necessary cryptography.” And I bet 48…
That’s not fair — at least ten work for Chinese intelligence.
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 al…
Not really...? Quantum stuff is real, there are real quantum computers that have been demonstrated to really do quantum operations. They're not close to being usable to break crypto yet, but it certainly makes sense to get ahead of it.
> There wouldn't be so much effort going into bridging air gapped systems if even traditional encryption could be trusted...
These are completely different problems. Encryption just keeps information confidential. By itself, it offers no _security_ guarantees. Even the strongest encryption would be moot against a keylogger. Crypto can be (and is being) used to provide some security, like via signed code, secure processors, and the such, but security is a multi-tiered thing -- you want all the protection you can get, and like keeping data encrypted at rest, air-gapping is just yet another layer of protection.