Live data from Hacker News

Post-quantum cryptography

en.wikipedia.org

1–10 of 15 posts

Re: Post-quantum cryptography

#4
I saw that NIST was considering a new breed of post-quantum PKI functions. Which would you recommend to use, if we wanted to make quantum resistant private key signing and encryption today?

Re: Post-quantum cryptography

#6
post #4

I saw that NIST was considering a new breed of post-quantum PKI functions. Which would you recommend to use, if we wanted to make quantum resistant private key signing and encryption today?

For Cyph[1], we went with SPHINCS[2] for signing and a combination of McEliece (specifically McBits[3]), NTRU[4], and SIDH[5] for public key encryption.

We also considered QcBits[6] as a more space-efficient alternative to McEliece, but it just seemed too new / not well understood for our tastes, and last I saw there was a recent attack on it that hadn't been mitigated yet. Definitely keeping an eye on it for the future though.

---

1: https://www.cyph.com/castle

2: https://sphincs.cr.yp.to

3: https://tungchou.github.io/mcbits

4: https://github.com/NTRUOpenSourceProject/ntru-crypto

5: https://github.com/Microsoft/PQCrypto-SIDH

6: https://tungchou.github.io/qcbits

Re: Post-quantum cryptography

#8
You know, I'm actually looking forward to the day that we can break existing cryptography. There's a lot of devices that are consumer unfriendly due to their security. Most famously, video game consoles. If we could break their security, it would open them wide to running custom code without tricky hacks that are inaccessible to the average end user. It would also allow enthusiast devs to release new games on disc and have them just boot on an unmodified console. This is something that happens already on older retro consoles like the NES where there security has already been broken.

Re: Post-quantum cryptography

#9

Is Bitcoin quantum resistant? Just asking for a friend. It would be embarrassing if Bitcoin's crypto was undermined in the near future.

Bitcoin transactions are only breakable by quantum computation once you reveal the public key behind an account's fingerprint (for example, by signing a transaction).

So you can avoid quantum attacks by making every transaction split your funds between the recipient and a new address which you control (this is also a good practice to avoid having your payments being tracked).

Re: Post-quantum cryptography

#10
post #6
post #4

I saw that NIST was considering a new breed of post-quantum PKI functions. Which would you recommend to use, if we wanted to make quantum resistant private key signing and encryption today?

For Cyph[1], we went with SPHINCS[2] for signing and a combination of McEliece (specifically McBits[3]), NTRU[4], and SIDH[5] for public key encryption. We also considered QcBits[6] as a more space-efficient alternative to McEliece, but it just seemed too new / not well understood for our tastes, and last I saw there was a recent attack on it that hadn't been mitigated yet. Definitely keeping an eye on it for the fut…

Note: there's a few dozen NTRU entries in the post quantum comp.
Post reply on HN