Deep-Tech Newsletter | August 2022.
A Successful Mathematical Attack on One of the NIST's Post-Quantum Cryptography Projects + Course Announcement.
Dear friends,
Last month was a historic month in modern cryptography as the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced the outcome of its long-awaited post-quantum cryptography (PQC) standardisation proposals (see paper here).
In the same announcement, NIST also advanced four additional algorithms as possible standards pending further testing, including one known as Supersingular Isogeny Key Encapsulation (SIKE). Interestingly, researchers from KU Leuven mounted a successful classical (non-quantum) attack on SIKE using the so-called "glue-and-split" theorem that originated from the paper 'The number of curves of genus two with elliptic differentials' by Ernst Kani! You can read summarised write up about the attack on this blog post and the original preprint paper entitled 'An efficient key recovery attack on SIDH (preliminary version)'.
The attack does not impact the four PQC algorithms selected by NIST as approved standards. But of course, the question is whether there are other advanced mathematical toolkits we can use to attack the PQC standards proposed by NIST via classical techniques & computers?!
We could argue that it took this long for SIKE to fall partly because the mathematics behind the attack is not easily accessible to people outside fields such as Arithmetic Algebraic Geometry. So over the coming months & years, there will be a high demand for people with advanced mathematical backgrounds to study the proposed PQC standards for loopholes and help with safe/correct implementation in products and services across the industry.
At Zaiku, we're committed to helping accelerate the proliferation of advanced branches of pure mathematics into emerging technologies through our internal projects and community initiatives such as quantumformalism.com & homotopicminds.com.
Upcoming Community Course: We're thrilled to announce that the start date for the long-due course on Measure Theory & Functional Analysis will be on Monday, August 29! The course was originally designed for those interested in learning the mathematics behind Continuous-variable quantum information, which uses infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces. However, some parts of the course will be helpful to folks in machine learning and signal processing (e.g., compressed sensing).
Do you know a technical person who may be interested in taking the course? If yes, please share the URL https://www.quantumformalism.com/measure-theory-and-functional-analysis for them to sign up. We'll do a live Q&A session over the coming weeks to unveil the course structure, topics covered, etc. The registration for the session is now open via https://www.crowdcast.io/c/mtfa-questions-and-answers.
Side note: Did you know that the original proof of the universal approximation theorem for neural networks used Hahn-Banach and Riesz Representation theorems? Well, these theorems are significant results in Functional Analysis!
Many thanks for reading. We look forward to sharing our deep-tech community building journey with you.
Zaiku Group team
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