Good point, we just dodged a bullet there. It’s worrying and reassuring at the same time. If it wasn’t for NIST’s open process for selecting new algorithms, they might not have discovered SIKE is broken until after it become a standard. Thankfully NIST has a years long, multi-round process for algo selection, where each team (and the public) can try to crack competitors’ algorithms. This helps filter out weak ones before making a final decision on the standard algo.
The problem seems to be finding a post-quantum algorithm that doesn’t get obliterated by pre-quantum computers like what happened to SIKE:
https://m-cacm.acm.org/news/269080-nist-post-quantum-cryptography-candidate-cracked/fulltext
Good point, we just dodged a bullet there. It’s worrying and reassuring at the same time. If it wasn’t for NIST’s open process for selecting new algorithms, they might not have discovered SIKE is broken until after it become a standard. Thankfully NIST has a years long, multi-round process for algo selection, where each team (and the public) can try to crack competitors’ algorithms. This helps filter out weak ones before making a final decision on the standard algo.