Hacker News Reader

The paper looks suspicious to me.

- Novel crypto analysis technique which can't be revealed because "a lot of work to be done to obtain an optimized, more efficient and industry-level version".

- Claim that success probability is low, but "we have a 2nd algorithm": "To date the probability of success is still very low (p = 0.025) but we are optimistic about the possibility of significantly increasing it in the upcoming months. Indeed we have a second algorithm, which is theoretically proven, with a success rate of 0.25. It is not yet fully tested and executed because it requires a higher computing power, although it is still reasonable for operational cryptanalysis (which can be repeated over time)."

- Claim that SIMON algorithm had been introduced in the Linux 4.16 kernel (it was Speck, not Simon). May be an honest typo.

- Testing on Odroid cluster.

- Can't find anything on "Alba3 Group" or the authors (who have @protonmail.com address -- also suspicious).

- "The only reference for this magnitude of cryptanalysis is [9]. In 2002, a 64-bit RC4 key was obtained in 1,754 days (300,000 participants). Today, to keep up with the evolution of computing power since 2002, it is necessary to divide by 2^10, or about 3 days with the same number of participants." It was RC5, not RC4 (it's even in the title of reference -- again, may be a typo), and how did they come up with 2^10 number?

I don't math, but it also looks suspicious: https://twitter.com/colmmacc/status/1127100892883312640