Single-Core CPU Cracked Post-Quantum Encryption Candidate Algorithm in Just an Hour
A late-stage candidate encryption algorithm that was meant to withstand decryption by powerful quantum computers in the future has been trivially cracked by using a computer running Intel Xeon CPU in an hour's time. The algorithm in question is SIKE — short for Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation — which made it to the fourth round of the Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) standardization process by the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). "Ran on a single core, the appended Magma code breaks the Microsoft SIKE challenges $IKEp182 and $IKEp217 in about 4 minutes and 6 minutes, respectively," KU Leuven researchers Wouter Castryck and Thomas Decru said in a new paper."A run on the SIKEp434 parameters, previously believed to meet NIST's quantum security level 1, took about 62 minutes, again on a single core." The code was executed on an Intel Xeon CPU E5-2630v2 at 2.60GHz, whi...