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Comment by j2kun | Hacker News Reader

Major systems and big companies like Google are already mid-transition to PQC. So it is alarming.

More to the point, the purpose of the encrypting system nobody uses is to have something to use if anybody ever makes the computer that doesn't exist. Now if that happens, what?

We really need to get people to take really complicated risks that might never come to pass much more seriously. Perhaps someone smart can explain the really complicated risks that might never come to pass to the government that doesn't really look beyond the three year time horizon and get them to allocate some of their money that doesn't really exist to help.

Furthermore this could have implications for fully homomorphic encryption schemes based on lattices. But nonetheless I laughed :)

So a thing which is currently useless because it runs at a speed that makes the Harvard Mark I look fast, might be rendered useless if a thing that doesn’t physically exist despite decades of effort is constructed? :P)

Google has dozens of chrome extensions in their app store that anyone can check in 2 mins are plain malware, and they do nothing about it. If they cared about security that's what they would be working on, these guys just want to publish papers.

I'm sure they have thought more about how to prioritize security threats than an anonymous internet commenter.

The fact that you work at Google and did not care to ask what are the extensions just confirms to me nobody there cares.

I’ll bite; what are some of these extensions?

HBO watch party. If relays a fake costumer support chat if you visit a site like united airlines, that puts you in touch with scammers (probably does other malwary stuff too). A friend almost got scammed by this, they reported it to someone they know who works at Google and a couple months later the extension is still up.

Tbh that is the only actual example I know, but after poking around a bit, ppl who actually know about security say that's the state of things with these extension and app store apps, and nobody at google seems to think fixing it is their job.

Funny thing is, they were asking this google friend for advice about getting rid of the malicious chat before they realized it was this chrome extension. The advice the google employee gave was to format the computer (it wouldn't have fixed it because once they logged into chrome again all the extensions would come back).

Hard sell that people running this clown show could be doing PQC in any meaningful sense (other than publishing papers. The papers are fine).

There was a previous one removed a few months ago for malware called HBO Max Watch Party. Was that it? If you have a specific extension id I can file a bug on your behalf.

And after reading about the situation internally, I can confirm there are dozens of people working on this problem, and that you have no idea what you're talking about. So please try to be a bit more humble.

Yes I am checking the link my friend sent me now it it was that one, it is down. Thank you for your interest.

Actually never mind, I double checked and it was just HBO watch party (it is still up and has the malware). I appreciate if you can take a look at this.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hbo-watch-party/dn...

This is the link to the malicious extension.

It has been removed, along with a dozen others that did similar tricks. I also looked for a prior report and didn't find any for this extension, which suggests to me that the extension has not been reported before. I suggest in the future using the existing malware reporting forms on the Chrome extension store, rather than venting in HN comment threads.

"One person doesn't care, therefore nobody cares"

Sadly you are like the 6th google employee I personally told about this (and it is still up).

Arrogance.

A fitting reply to a total non-sequitur, more like. A huge corps handling of browser extensions has absolutely zero to do with encryption algorithms, and security is such a big field that "care about security" means nothing at all.

The comment was just a chance to vent anger at Google in an unproductive way.

It is a pretty random example, but it is meant to say that the math is rarely the limiting factor for security. People spend time thinking about this type of stuff because they like it, not because it is actually important for security.

In my mind RSA is the last instance of a mathematical development changing the game of security. After that it is twists of the same idea on more obscure mathematical objects, and pyrotechnic protocols that only the truly unhinged (ethereum people) are willing to try out in practice.

Their deployment is additive. You would need to break both the PCQ and classical schemes, so they’d be unaffected here.

They wouldn't be immediately hacked, especially as this is a quantum algorithm anyway. But if it turns out that the current PQC schemes are not quantum-resistant, then that work will need to be redone (unless the progress in quantum computing stalls out, I guess). The current result does not break Kyber / Dilithium / NTRU variants / Falcon / FrodoKEM even assuming it's correct, but obviously there's some concern that the a follow-up result might improve on it.

The NIST process has been running for 7 years, though they do have a few "non-lattice" schemes waiting for a 4th round of standardization: the code-based schemes Classic McEliece, BIKE and HQC. We could switch over to those, and the work to add crypto-agility to protocols would not be wasted, but the work on lattice software and hardware would be largely wasted.

Also, error-correcting codes are also solving short-vector problems in a lattice! But since the lattice has a different shape maybe it would be fine? After codes the list gets pretty thin... like there's CSIDH, but it's very slow, has partial quantum attacks, and it isn't very trusted after SIKE got broken in half.

there's always post quantum rsa https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/351.pdf. yes it sucks, but at least for the quantum computers we're likely to have 20 years from now, you could probably get away with a 1gb key...

Lamport signatures work and are PQC. There are solutions that are practical to use (1gb rsa keys are not). Just not drop in replacements without large tradeoffs.

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