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

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

#91
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

quantum is used for problems like finding the factorization of the number 4. Jumping is also real, but we need not worry about people jumping out of the atmosphere.

> Jumping is also real, but we need not worry about people jumping out of the atmosphere. If people are jumping twice as high this year than last, we would ;) https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-chart-shows-the-progre... (BTW this reply is not meant to make a point about the state of quantum -- it's complicated -- but merely as a response to the analogy)

I'm not much of a believer. It's worth pointing out that as the number of qubits goes up, so too does the error rate.

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

#92
post #56
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If by "crypto agility" one means "we should research diverse cryptographic primitives and constructions so that we can be ready if something we rely upon breaks", nobody disagrees with that. But that's not what Schneier means. What he says instead is that "it’s vital that our systems be able to easily swap in new algorithms when required". That approach has a virtually unbroken track record of failure. It demands neg…

Well i agree generally, if we are talking about these new, basically experimental, post quantum algorithms, i feel like the balance shifts a bit since they are still so new (on the other hand maybe using them is just premature at this point)

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

#95
post #10

You 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

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

#97
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…

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

#100
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…

Even if you don't reuse keys you will be vulnerable the moment you do the first transaction - it will be the miner who sees your public key first. Even if you mine your own transactions you will be vulnerable, because the block could be orphaned, and anyone could then see your public key.
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