Post quantum at Cloudflare. Opinions are my own. Also on Bluesky (https://xitter.cf/t.co/JNf0UuXmB6)
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Joined July 2009
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Christopher Patton retweeted
Module SIS has been around since Micciancio’s 2002 paper, and module structure since 1996 NTRU.
Christopher Patton retweeted
CLAUDE FOUND THE SEEDS
anthropic.com/research/ecdsa…
Guess who standardized time: *NIST* nist.gov/si-redefinition/sec…
Christopher Patton retweeted
When the Loma Prieta earthquake hit on Tuesday October 17, 1989, BART was put to the test like never before.
Not only did service resume just a few hours after the quake, BART ran 24-hours a day, seven days a week for about a month while the Bay Bridge was closed.
Christopher Patton retweeted
A woman gets assaulted at a Trump rally, and the crowd chants “USA! USA!”
There’s something deeply sick about turning violence into patriotism.
I’m not sure I’ll ever hear that chant the same way again after the Trump era. And that pains me.
Christopher Patton retweeted
Can you build blind signatures from ML-DSA? Yes of course you can! But what will the performance be?
In recent work, we looked at the efficiency of Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge proofs of knowledge of an ML-DSA signature.
Christopher Patton retweeted
Indeed. There is a best algorithm to break RSA-2048 that only God knows. It might be classical or quantum. The quantum one is practical. We hope the classical one isn't. AI helps us answer that question faster. AI doesn't break cryptography: it lets us know it was broken faster.
"discrete log is just like a math conjecture, it's a matter of time and tokens"
No. AI may optimize the best known algorithms and/or implementations, but if factoring/DL are hard (although not NP-complete, if P!=NP we know such hard "NP-intermediate" exist), then no efficient solver exists, ergo no AI can find one. Most likely P!=NP.
< insert caveats about worst/average-case hardness>
Christopher Patton retweeted
This is what I have been telling everyone who will listen.
The most valuable thing the frontier labs can now do for crypto (and math more broadly) is publish their *negative* results. What ideas they tried, how much compute they used, and what obstacles they found.
Christopher Patton retweeted
I’ve had a few people write to ask me to follow up on a (reply!) tweet I wrote that’s gotten a lot of retweets. I considered deleting it just to avoid the headache, but I think that would make people more paranoid. So let me share my thoughts.
Christopher Patton retweeted
We’ve lost an icon. Margaret Hamilton, a computer science pioneer best known for her work at MIT leading development of the flight software for the Apollo missions to the moon, has died at 90. Read about her legacy via MIT News: news.mit.edu/2026/margaret-h…
ALT Margaret Hamilton is reclined inside a NASA spacecraft module, surrounded by control panels and switches.
Christopher Patton retweeted
AI is very likely to help cryptanalysis, in some form, but I see no technical evidence to justify the claim that public-key assumptions are more at risk than symmetric constructions.
Christopher Patton retweeted
I remember there being a cult-like obsession with pushing for non-negotiable cryptographic protocols and railing against agility just because some eager engineers went hog wild with defining code points. What happened to that?
Christopher Patton retweeted
We can’t assess AI risk to cryptography, but we can assess people making nonsensical claims about that risk.
If AI breaks a widely used cryptographic primitive, the most likely target is hash functions. Humans already broke MD2, MD5, SHA-1. RSA and elliptic curves have held up.
If we can’t do public key encryption anymore, then we’re gonna have to repurpose @RealWorldCrypto for exchanging key material in person. Bring a notepad and paper.