[tux3]

This is a good take, there's really not much to argue about.

>[...] the availability of HPKE hybrid recipients, which blocked on the CFRG, which took almost two years to select a stable label string for X-Wing (January 2024) with ML-KEM (August 2024), despite making precisely no changes to the designs. The IETF should have an internal post-mortem on this, but I doubt we’ll see one

My kingdom for a standards body that discusses and resolves process issues.

[adgjlsfhk1]

I think the anti-hybrid argument the article makes is clearly wrong. Even if CRQCs existed today, we still should be using hybrid algorithms because even once CRQCs exist, they will be slow, expensive, and power hungry for at least a decade. The hybrid algorithms at a minimum make the cost of any attack ~$1M, which is way better than half of the PQC algorithms that made it to the 3rd stage of the PQC competition (2 of them can be broken on a laptop)

[scythmic_waves]

Is it?

Your reasoning relies on this being true:

> [CRQCs] will be slow, expensive, and power hungry for at least a decade

How could you know that? What if it was 5 years? 1 year? 6 months?

I predict there will be an insane global pivot once Q-day arrives. No nation wants to invest billions in science fiction. Every nation wants to invest billions in a practical reality of being able to read everyone's secrets.

[adgjlsfhk1]

The absolute low end of cost of a QC is the cost of an MRI machine ~100k-400k (cost of cooling the computer to super low temps). Sure we expect QCs to get faster and cheaper over time, but putting 100% faith in the security of the PQC algorithms seems like a bad idea with no upside.

[phicoh]

It is the paradox of PQC: from a classical security point of view PQC cannot be trusted (except for hash-based algorithms which are not very practical). So to get something we can trust we need hybrid. However, the premise for introducing PQC in the first place is that quantum computers can break classical public key crypto, so hybrid doesn't provide any benefit over pure PQC.

Yes, the sensible thing to do is hybrid. But that does assume that either PQC cannot be broken by classical computers or that quantum computers will be rare or expensive enough that they don't break your classical public key crypto.

[FiloSottile]

> from a classical security point of view PQC cannot be trusted

[citation needed]

https://words.filippo.io/crqc-timeline/#fn:lattices

[Tyyps]

Just a little selections of recent attacks on a few post quantum assumptions:

Isogenie/SIDH: https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/975

Lattices: https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1460

Classical McEliece: https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1193

Saying that you can trust blindly PQ assumptions is a very dangerous take.

[cyberax]

It's purely a matter of _potential_ issues. The research on lattice-based crypto is still young compared to EC/RSA. Side channels, hardware bugs, unexpected research breakthroughs all can happen.

And there are no downsides to adding regular classical encryption. The resulting secret will be at least as secure as the _most_ secure algorithm.

The overhead of additional signatures and keys is also not that large compared to regular ML-KEM secrets.

[FiloSottile]

We can disagree on the tradeoff, but if you see no upside, you are missing the velocity cost of the specification work, the API design, and the implementation complexity. Plus the annoying but real social cost of all the bikeshedding and bickering.

[adgjlsfhk1]

All of those are costs are at least as high for non-hybrid. The spec and API are just as easy to design (because we have really good and simple ECC libraries), and the bikeshedding and bickering will be a lot less if people stop trying to force pure PQC algorithms that lots of people see as incredibly risky for incredibly little benefit.

[Tyyps]

Indeed anti-hybrids arguments are very dangerous takes at best. People are putting a tremendous amount of faith in very understudied assumptions, in particular given the complexity of geometric relations and the structure of current lattice based scheme.

[OhMeadhbh]

I missed you at the most recent CRFG meeting.