[A2017U1]

While likely right, that particular entry was more a comedy submission by djb himself, no one is taking pqRSA seriously, the merging of the sig/encryption versions too was itself hilarious and a subtle metajoke about how big the competition is. There's plenty on the line here and govts know it, there's a little bit of a lottery feeling associated with it all.

I do like their honesty about people going after easy targets. The real goal here is breaking some of the big contenders and hopefully more people have a crack.

SIKE and NTRU needs some serious attention/money/cred associated with breaking it

[jepler]

The danger is that people, like me, will have literally no idea that this is a "comedy submission". I mean, I know that djb is well-respected in his field and so as an interested layperson I would tend to assume that anything that looks serious is serious. In fact, I did just that when I tried to read the pqRSA paper...

[tanderson92]

I don't know how much danger there ever was of taking an e-mail like this one seriously: https://groups.google.com/a/list.nist.gov/forum/#!topic/pqc-...

At the time, it read like pure satire to me.

[tptacek]

Why is that a danger?

[cyphar]

They might decide to use it, or push for its use in some product. Obviously it's an extreme example, but stuff like that does happen (not that I think cryptographers shouldn't have fun).

[tptacek]

You don't think that anyone who would non-ironically implement this paper would do just as much damage with every reasonable cryptography paper?