Last month, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) announced the winners of its competition to develop new encryption standards to protect against a (yet) hypothetical threat: quantum computers. It is predicted that such equipment will one day be so powerful that it can easily decrypt modern passwords. To counter this future threat, the US government has invested in creating new encryption standards that can withstand hardware attacks of the coming days.
NIST has selected four encryption algorithms that it believes will provide adequate security, with other algorithms to be compared. After the four finalists were selected, NIST announced four more finalists that were considered potential candidates for standardization.
Unfortunately, one of these additional algorithms doesn’t seem all that robust. SIKE was one of NIST’s junior finalists, but a recent cyberattack managed to crack SIKE with relative ease. At the same time, the hacked computer was far from a quantum computer: instead it was a single-core computer, which took only an hour to decipher the ingenious SIKE encryption.
Source: Ferra
