June 9, 2021
Craig Costello - Microsoft Research
To mark the 10-year anniversary of supersingular isogeny Diffie-Hellman, I will touch on 10 points in defense and support of the SIKE protocol, including the rise of classical hardness, the fact that quantum computers do not seem to offer much help in solving the underlying problem, and the importance of concrete cryptanalytic clarity. In the final section I will discuss the upcoming SIKE challenges: over $50k USD will be up for grabs for the solutions of mini instances that, according to the SIKE team's security analysis, provide significantly less than 64 bits of classical security. I conclude by urging the proponents of other schemes to construct analogous challenge instances.