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quotemstr 3 hours ago

One attack weakens HAWK, a post-quantum cryptography cipher candidate. I don't trust these PQC things one bit. I'll use them in combination with a strong clasically-resistant cipher (in so-called hybrid encryption modes), but not alone.

There's a push to turn off the classical modes and rely entirely on PQC for both quantum and classical security. Uh... no, thank you? Why would we want to do that at this point? The classical cipher component isn't hurting anything. Awfully creepy to pushing reliance on the new thing alone.

... especially now that we have LLM-discovered attacks on the new things.

JuniperMesos 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The classical cipher component is additonal complexity in the protocol and maybe some meaningful amount of additonal time to compute and key data to store/transmit, is it not? I can see why we'd like to avoid effectively encrypting the same data twice with different protocols, one of which is known to be vulnerable to quantum computer based attacks.

vrighter 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

good thing quantum computers that can factor numbers have never been built. No number was ever really factored without cheating, the actual shor's algorithm has never been implemented. And we're not really any closer to

ameliaquining 2 hours ago | parent [-]

That last sentence is not true; we have gotten much closer to building a quantum computer that can run Shor's algorithm. Organizations like Google and Cloudflare have declared a 2029 deadline to completely stop depending on the security of pre-quantum algorithms; hitting that deadline is going to cost a lot of engineering resources, but they're paying that cost because they think there's too great a chance that nation-state adversaries will have scalable quantum computers by then. See https://words.filippo.io/crqc-timeline/ and the various posts linked therein, including from the aforementioned companies.

quotemstr an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Classic ciphers are damn fast and small compared to PQC. If you're doing PQC anyway, doing classical cryptography at the same time has negligible cost.

That makes attempts to push PQC-only modes super suspicious to me. Smells like Dual_EC_DRBG.

some_furry 17 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> One attack weakens HAWK, a post-quantum cryptography cipher candidate. I don't trust these PQC things one bit. I'll use them in combination with a strong clasically-resistant cipher (in so-called hybrid encryption modes), but not alone.

HAWK is a signature algorithm, not encryption.