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

spectrum.ieee.org

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

#61

Post by robocat »

nimbius wrote: post #37

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.

Your seem to be using “chip on the shoulder” to mean “being overly proud”: is your usage common in your circles or is it a mistake? https://grammarist.com/idiom/chip-on-your-shoulder/

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

#62

Post by lizardactivist »

nashashmi wrote: post #25

What is the possibility that cryptowallets can succumb to these kinds of attacks? How is it possible that Satoshi's wallet has still, after so many years, not been hacked using a brute force mechanism?

It's because the search space (number of possible keys to guess) is astronomic; 2^256.

If you had a billion people, each person owning one billion computers, each computer capable of guessing a billion keys per second, then a billion years would still not have exhausted one-billionth of all the possible keys.

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

#63

Post by olliej »

amirhirsch wrote: post #32
tptacek wrote: post #21

Earlier 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.

Ease of understanding isn’t the same as good though. For example RSA is much easier to explain and implement than ECC, but it is much worse.

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

#64

Post by lizardactivist »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #8

> 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…

The smartest people in the world are always Americans. No wonder the rest of the world can't make things on their own, and always steal American technology!

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

#65

Post by kevincox »

RL_Quine wrote: post #28
jabbany wrote: post #27

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…

> especially considering that almost every value in the system is sha2(sha2())

Why does this give a meaningful improvement? Is this just security through obscurity? Presumably if this had significant benifits sha2 would have been defined this way to start with right? Or is it just that other users will be broken before this "double strong" version so that you have more warning? But isn't shaw defined as a number of rounds anyways?

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

#68

Post by chrisweekly »

moffkalast wrote: post #4
oipoloi wrote: 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…

Well they for sure have picked a very ironic name for it. "The vault is completely unhackable." "SIKE"

+1, funny -- but for the sake of non-native English speakers, FTR, it's pronounced the same as "psych" and is colloquial for a sarcastic "ha-ha, just kidding"

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

#69

Post by formerkrogemp »

chrisweekly wrote: post #68
moffkalast wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well they for sure have picked a very ironic name for it. "The vault is completely unhackable." "SIKE"

+1, funny -- but for the sake of non-native English speakers, FTR, it's pronounced the same as "psych" and is colloquial for a sarcastic "ha-ha, just kidding"

I often don't think to explain these things, so thank you for taking the time to explain to others the context.

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

#70

Post by olliej »

tptacek wrote: post #51
olliej wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quantum safe crypto isn’t FUD, NIST’s steadfast refusal to specify a dual system, especially given their historical laundering of NSA back doors is super questionable, but there exist (at least one that I know of) crypto systems that have no exploitable bias. The problem is the impractically large key sizes. Afaict a lot of pqc work is trying to reduce the key sizes to something reasonable.

Horseshit. It's literally not NIST's job to design a "dual system"; the project was to standardize PQC constructions, not whole protocols. Everybody that deploys PQC anywhere is going to deploy "dual systems". This complaint is like claiming NIST is corrupt because they didn't standardize an authenticated key exchange along with SHA-3.

It is literally NIST’s job to define the standards that people are meant to use.

What you’re saying is that NIST not considering a dual system standard is fine because no one would consider relying solely on the standardized PQC algorithms and would obviously implement their own version of a dual system, only with less understanding of potential pitfalls or analysis for weaknesses.

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