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Comment by oipoloi | Hacker News Reader

"To me what is most surprising is that the attack seemingly came out of nowhere,” says cryptographer Jonathan Katz at the University of Maryland at College Park, who did not take part in this new work. “There were very few prior results showing any weaknesses in SIKE, and then suddenly this result appeared with a completely devastating attack—namely, it finds the entire secret key, and does so relatively quickly without any quantum computation."

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The funny bit about this is that the principles that broke SIDH were in the literature --- they owe to a late-1990's theorem† by Ernst Kani, a mathematician in Ontario. We spoke to Steven Galbraith about this (I wouldn't know who Kani was if I hadn't read Galbraith, just to be clear) and he'd even talked to Kani long before any of this came out. But Kani isn't a cryptographer and apparently isn't even especially interested in cryptography, so the dots didn't get connected until much later.

† That's the "25-year-old theorem" from the article.

For those curious, here's the full publication from Kani's website (The one linked to in the article is behind a paywall):

https://mast.queensu.ca/~kani/papers/numgenl.pdf

Well they for sure have picked a very ironic name for it.

"The vault is completely unhackable."

"SIKE"

+1, funny -- but for the sake of non-native English speakers, FTR, it's pronounced the same as "psych" and is colloquial for a sarcastic "ha-ha, just kidding"

I often don't think to explain these things, so thank you for taking the time to explain to others the context.

For additional cultural context, I think this usage was popularized by Eddie Murphy in Delirious (NSFW language: https://youtu.be/Ft4kEk5CHrE, you'll want to listen to at least 2:15)

Given that Eddie is telling a story from his youth it's probably fair to say it was in common use 10+ years earlier - which is consistent with my vernacular at the time.

Further, "sike" has become a common spelling when used to indicate "not really." At least, according to urban dictionary and other online dictionaries.

> it's pronounced the same as "psych"

It’s actually spelled “psych.” It’s a derivative of “to psych out.”

We're agreed in how and why to spell it that way. But the bastardized phonetic spelling "sike" is fairly common too.

If you're going to address non-native English speakers, using acronyms like FTR (I suppose that refers to for-the-record, but one can never be sure on the Internet... could easily be something like for-the-retarded in some circles) may not be the best idea, BTW (by the way :D).

Thanks. Native speaker, no idea it was used like this.

> To me what is most surprising is that the attack seemingly came out of nowhere,

This wasn't my understanding at all. The specific issue in isogeny based cryptography which the attack exploits has been a source of worry in the cryptographic community for a while, and is exactly why NIST put SIKE in the "for further consideration & crypt-analysis" category when making their standardization decisions.

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