A Swiss company says it found weakness that imperials encryption | Hacker News Reader

A Swiss company says it found weakness that imperials encryption

bloomberg.com

22 pointsuvznab17 comments

I very much preferred the title "imperials encryption", thought the empire was destroying encryption. Probably would have caused the Star Wars if they hadn't occurred already!

"I told you so", hash functions will be reversed. few years ago people laughed at it, thinking hash functions are immune from analysis. All these cryptowallets are insecure, if you believe that it will take a quadrillion years to bruteforce a hash its an assumption that is dependent on current computers and now quantum algorithms make this assumption suspect for all hashes, regardless how quantum-proof they're.

TLDR; A company is claiming that they have found a way to reverse a hash function, and that they can use this to break current and post-quantum encryption algorithms. They provide no evidence to back up this claim, but they are patenting a "secure" algorithm that they'll make available for "free".

I'm sure that unsupported claim and magic patent aren't related to their valuation.

It's a dumpster fire of an article. Claiming they can break a range of encryption algorithms, including AES and can reverse hash functions.

Then at the very end promoting their patented "quantum key distribution" to fix it which is asymmetric cryptography and has nothing to do with fixing AES if its broken.

There's an ongoing NIST competition for post-quantum key distribution right now that they don't seem to be participating in. Scrutiny probably isn't desirable when you are VC backed though.

Until they publish something, the only valid stance is that this Bloomberg reporter got taken for a ride with big baseless claims like they always do.

Why does a company make a bold statement like this but not back any of it up? Are they a publix traded company and are hoping for a stock bump?

Not a publicly traded company. Perhaps disclosing does in some way assist their patent application(s).

Looks more like a russian company to me (with a mailbox in Switzerland). Pity; I wish there was more revolutionary engineering happening here.

Well, sounds theoretical, so this might not (probably will not) pan out. If it does, I wonder the implications for P=NP? Maybe QP=NP?

Apart from the obvious consequences for bitcoin, what other typical services would be disrupted by this?

They claim that AES is (edit: "may be... in a few years") decipherable, and AES is used pretty much everywhere, so if they actually make a practical attack, then everything would be disrupted.

Yes, everything. But, I mean, there's a difference between breaking into a vault and comms eavesdropping: one can be fixed, the other one not.

s/imperials/imperils/ in the title

And tldr: they claim to have found ways to use quantum computers to compromise encryption algorithms but they didn't publish anything yet.

Maybe they’re too busy taking all the bitcoinz?

Specifically it looks like they're claiming that AES can be efficiently cracked with quantum annealing.

How revolutionary...

...it actually is, if it's true. most quantum-resistant crypto has focused on public-key cryptography. and quantum annealing is much nearer-term than regular quantum computing, that's the kind of machines that D-Wave is building and selling today.

it would be extraordinarily disruptive if this turns out to not be empty hype.

If you have a way of cracking meaningful encryption, you don't have to publish anything about how you did it, you just demonstrate that you can decrypt something.

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