Last month, the agency selected its first group of winners: four protocols that, with some revision, will be deployed as a quantum shield. It also announced four additional candidates still under consideration.
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Then on July 30, a pair of researchers revealed that they had broken one of those candidates in an hour on a laptop. (Since then, others have made the attack even faster, breaking the protocol in a matter of minutes.) "An attack that's so dramatic and powerful … was quite a shock," said Steven Galbraith, a mathematician and computer scientist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Not only was the mathematics underlying the attack surprising, but it reduced the (much-needed) diversity of post-quantum cryptography — eliminating an encryption protocol that worked very differently from the vast majority of schemes in the NIST competition.
"It's a bit of a bummer," said Christopher Peikert, a cryptographer at the University of Michigan.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/post-quantum-cryptography-scheme-is-cracked-on-a-laptop-20220824/