Comment by wahern
4 hours ago
SIKE made it all the way to round 3. It failed spectacularly, but it happened rather abruptly. In one sense it wasn't surprising because of its novelty, but the actual attack was somewhat surprising--nobody was predicting it would crumble so thoroughly so quickly. Notably, the approach undergirding it is still thought secure; it was the particular details that caused it to fail.
It's hubris to say there are no questions, especially for key exchange. The general classes of mathematical problems for PQC seem robust, but that's generally not how crypto systems fail. They fail in the details, both algorithmically and in implementation gotchas.
From a security engineering perspective, there's no persuasive reason to avoid general adoption of, e.g., the NIST selections and related approaches. But when people suggest not to use hybrid schemes because the PQC selections are clearly robust on their own, well then reasonable people can disagree. Because, again, the devil is in the details.
The need to proclaim "no questions" feels more like a reaction to lay skepticism and potential FUD, for fear it will slow the adoption of PQC. But that's a social issue, and imbibing that urge may cause security engineers to let their guard down.
What's your point? SIKE has literally nothing to do with MLKEM. There is no relationship between the algorithms. Essentially everybody working on PQC, including Bernstein himself, have converged on lattices, which, again, were a competitor to curves as a successor to RSA --- they are old.
SIKE: not lattices. Literally moon math. Do you understand how SIKE/SIDH works? It's fucking wild.
I'm going to keep saying this: you know the discussion is fully off the rails when people bring SIKE/SIDH into it as evidence against MLKEM.
You may not have any questions about the security of ML-KEM, but many people do. See, for example, DJB's compilation of such doubts from the IETF WG: https://blog.cr.yp.to/20260221-structure.html
DJB himself seems to prefer hybrid over non-hybrid precisely over concern about the unknowns: https://blog.cr.yp.to/20260219-obaa.html
These doubts may not be the kind curious onlookers have in mind, but to say there are no doubts among researchers and practitioners is a misrepresentation. In fact, you're flatly contradicting what DJB has said on the matter:
> SIKE is not an isolated example: https://cr.yp.to/papers.html#qrcsp shows that 48% of the 69 round-1 submissions to the NIST competition have been broken by now.
https://archive.cr.yp.to/2026-02-21/18:04:14/o2UJA4Um1j0ursy...
Unqualified assurances is what you hear from a salesman. You're trying to sell people on PQC. There's no reason to believe ML-KEM is a lemon, but you're effectively saying, "it's the last KEX scheme we'll ever need", and that's just not honest from an engineering point of view, even if it's what people need to hear.