Yawning Angel transcribed 3.0K bytes:
On Sat, 18 Feb 2017 14:07:40 +0530 Jaskaran Singh jvsg1303@gmail.com wrote:
I'm particularly interested to work on making TOR Handshakes Post-Quantum Safe. I feel that this should be implemented at the earliest because adversaries could store the network traffic and decrypt it later on using Quantum Computers when they're invented.
So there's good news and bad news.
The good news is that PQ handshake stuff will happen, sooner rather than later.
The bad news is that, work on it is on going, and it does not make a good GSOC project because, the bulk of the implementation work will likely happen before the summer.
It will?
- Implement the NewHope-Simple algorithm[1] because we'll not be able
to use the Vanilla NewHope as it is protected by some patents. I wasn't able to find any implementation of NewHope Simple. So can the Vanilla NewHope Implementation be tweaked to convert it into NewHope Simple? Or would we have to write it from ground up? I don't know about the patent laws regarding it.
I haven't talked to Peter in a while (and will ask him after I send this), but I am not aware of any patent claims against the vanilla NewHope algorithm (and the NewHope-Simple paper does not mention this at all either).
Sorry, I'm being deliberately vague about this because I don't want to feed the patent trolls or provide a weapon to anyone who wants to fight against good crypto, but the patent exists, and it affects nearly all lattice-based handshakes. NewHope simple is not affected.
My (ongoing, but Nick asked me to stop last summer until there was funding for it) work on integrating standard NewHope is here:
https://gitweb.torproject.org/user/isis/tor.git/log/?h=feature/rebelalliance
Best,