Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Tyyps 68 days ago
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.

2 comments

I don't think you said (or cited) what you think you said.

Leaving aside that you actually didn't cite a lattice attack paper, the "dual attack" on lattice cryptography is older than P-256 was when Curve25519 was adopted to replace it. It's a model attack, going all the way back to Regev. It is to MLKEM what algebraic attacks were (are?) to AES.

You know you're in trouble in these discussions when someone inevitably cites SIDH. SIDH has absolutely nothing to do with lattices; in fact, it has basically nothing to do with any other form of cryptography. It was a wildly novel approach that attracted lots of attention because it took a form that was pin-compatible with existing asymmetric encryption (unlike MLKEM, which provides only a KEM).

People who bring up SIDH in lattice discussions are counting on non-cryptography readers not to know that lattice cryptography is quite old and extremely well studied; it was a competitor to elliptic curves for the successor to RSA.

With that established: what exactly is the point you think those three links make in this discussion? What did you glean by reading those three papers?

He's obviously not saying that you can "trust blindly" any PQ algorithm out there, just that there are some that have appeared robust over many years of analysis.
He is assessing that the risk of seeing a quantum computer break dlog cryptography is stronger than the risk of having post quantum assumptions broken, in particular for lattices.

One can always debate but we have seen more post quantum assumptions break during the last 15 years than we have seen concrete progress in practical quantum factorisation (I'm not talking about the theory).