Comment by tptacek
5 hours ago
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".
5 hours ago
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.
Yeah I get that, what I am really asking is that I know in my field, I can quickly get a vibe as to whether certain new work is good or not so good, and where any bugaboos are likely to be. For those who know PQC like I know economics, do they believe at this point that the algorithms have been analyzed successfully to a level comparable to DH or RSA? Or is this really gonna be a rush job under the gun because we have no choice?
1 reply →
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.