Comment by moi2388

8 hours ago

Theory. And afaik there are still questions as to if the PQ algorithms are actually secure.

There are not in fact meaningful questions about whether the settled-on PQC constructions are secure, in the sense of "within the bounds of our current understanding of QC".

  • Didn't one of the PQC candidates get found to have a fatal classical vulnerability? Are we confident we won't find any future oopsies like that with the current PQC candidates?

    • The whole point of the competition is to see if anybody can cryptanalyze the contestants. I think part of what's happening here is that people have put all PQC constructions in bucket, as if they shared an underlying technology or theory, so that a break in one calls all of them into question. That is in fact not at all the case. PQC is not a "kind" of cryptography. It's a functional attribute of many different kinds of cryptography.

      The algorithm everyone tends to be thinking of when they bring this up has literally nothing to do with any cryptography used anywhere ever; it was wildly novel, and it was interesting only because it (1) had really nice ergonomics and (2) failed spectacularly.

      3 replies →

    • It's the same situation with classical encryption. It's not uncommon for a candidate algorithm [to be discovered ] to be broken during the selection process.

there are no meaningful questions. The only way there are meaningful questions is if you think global cryptographers + governments are part of a cabal to build insecure schemes. The new schemes use

1. cryptography developed across the world, 2. the actual schemes were overwhelmingly by European authors 3. standardized by the US 4. other countries standardizations have been substantially similar (e.g. the ongoing Korean one, the German BSI's recommendations. China's CACR [had one with substantially similar schemes](https://www.sdxcentral.com/analysis/china-russia-to-adopt-sl...). Note that this is separate from a "standardization", which sounds like it is starting soon).

In particular, given that China + the US ended up with (essentially the same) underlying math, you'd have to have a very weird hypothetical scenario for the conclusion to not be "these seem secure", and instead "there is a global cabal pushing insecure schemes".

tbf - since we still don't know if p != np, there are still questions about if the current algorithms are secure also.