sweis

Yes. I did speak to a cryptographer.

A buddy did it with Claude, so zero time.

I have seen nothing that would make me believe there is a "[gag] by the NSA" preventing frontier labs from publishing cryptographic results.

We published HAWK and McEliece attacks no problem.

I think they legitimately did not know. The person who worked on it directly, Jerry Solinas, did not remember and gave an explanation that turned out to be wrong. In his defense, multiple people told the same story about hashing a phrase that was wrong.

If they did know, they could have handed over these timestamps 15 years ago and put the issue to bed.

The two people were Bob Reiter and Jerry Solinas. Jerry wrote in a 2015 email to Daniel Bernstein that he thought it was a hash of the passphrase. I corroborated that story with 4 people, including two ex-NSA folks off the record.

Everyone was wrong!

I wasn't able to reach Bob. He was working in private industry as of 2018, but never responded.

13 years of tinfoil hats for srand48(time(NULL)

Yep, they ran on some newer GPUs so were able to use fewer. Their implementation was faster than mine on RSA-260. For RSA-896, mine improved the performance a bit and selected a good polynomial.

I’ll post more details once I get a chance. I wanted to publish as soon as I had the factors because I was beat by 48 hours last time.

I misspoke and corrected down thread.

The HAWK attack was on a 3rd round PQC candidate that had been under adversarial review by experts for 3 years. It is an outlier and most vulnerabilities are easier to find.

“ There was a bug in an OpenPGP library which finally gave us an excuse to tear encrypted email via PGP to shreds. Our special guest William Woodruff joined us to help explain the vuln and indulge our gnashing of teeth on why email was never meant to be encrypted and how other modern tools do the job much, much better.”