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Writer's picturemansour ansari

Post Quantum supremacy encryption algorithm contender broken in one hour by one core classical pc.

The post Quantum era needs a new encryption system that is resilient to quantum computer attacks by the bad guys.


 

Flipping through some quantum encryption news, I noticed the NIST (US Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology) selected four post-quantum computing encryption algorithms to replace algorithms like RSA ( public-key cryptosystem that is widely used for secure data transmission), Diffie-Hellman, and elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman. Each are unique in their approach.



Although highly secure in classical computing environment, these encryption algorithms are believed unable to withstand attacks from a quantum computer. So, four algorithms proposed as potential replacements are believed to be resilient against a possible quantum computer in the near future.


One of these proposed methodologies is SIKE (Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation) encryption. Recently, SIKE was broken, of course, not with bad intentions, but to prove the efficacy of the proposed methodology. The successful attack on SIKE didn't impact other algorithms.


Researchers from the Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography group at KU Leuven published a document titled An Efficient Key Recovery Attack on SIDH (Preliminary Version), which described a complex technique in math and a single traditional one-core PC to recover the encryption keys protecting the SIKE-protected transactions. The entire process requires only about an hour.

The feat makes the researchers, Wouter Castryck and Thomas Decru, eligible for a $50,000 reward from Microsoft. They should claim it!


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