How China is Cracking Postquantum Cryptography
- Trevor Alexander Nestor
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 2 hours ago
This month I'm visiting a lab in Beijing that claims to be investigating novel physics that would be capable of breaking the NP-Hard shortest vector problem in postquantum lattice cryptography - NIST's new standards (FIPS 203 and FIPS 204) that were supposed to safeguard against quantum attacks. Any breach of this would be catastrophic to banks, cryptocurrencies (like ICP), governments, and institutional stability. New physics may be required to breach it.
Previously, I've had peer review articles on the theoretical feasibility of breaking postquantum cryptography published and cited by leading researchers (even at the World Economics Forum) on this topic -
it was my undergraduate professor fields medalist Dr. Richard Borcherds at UC Berkeley who first got me interested in this topic, as his research into lattice maths and frontiers into quantum gravity research is directly applicable. I'm here to report that to hand the universe any class of ostensibly uncrackable encryption is much like to hand a lock to the grand lock and keymaker and claim that it cannot be unlocked - something quite hubristic to suggest. Indeed, we know from physics even with the black hole information paradox - the universe's most extreme one way information gate - unitarity should be preserved.
Interestingly, the field of physics known as Majorana physics which they are studying at Microsoft could be the answer - which may also be related to the mechanism by which the brain generates consciousness - an NP-Hard problem - classifying the problem as out of reach from our current computational technology and future quantum computing technology. The new physics required lies at the intersection of classical physics and quantum field theory - quantum gravity - and I've got a preprint out that is currently under peer review at a top journal on this topic.
It sure is a shame that Microsoft wanted to wrongfully terminate me from the company so that I no longer have any reason to care about sharing all of this publicly (they can't even get their Majorana One chip to work after lying to their shareholders about it). I will provide future updates as I retain further information.
The idea for this postquantum cryptography is that this new cryptography is based on what are known as lattice problems. You have a "high dimensional" lattice (essentially a sort of hierarchical matrix where the "extra dimensions" are complexity abstractions rather than physical dimensions) - finding the shortest vector in these problems is known to be a problem that is NP-Hard - a classification of computational complexity that is known to be intractable for our current and likely emerging quantum computers - even with prime factorization speedups like Grover's algorithm.
With new theories of gravity, one might actually be able to develop a quantum gravity computer - where gravity itself might collapse evolving wavefunctions of particles traversing the lattice space to the shortest vector using spectral methods. What's interesting is that this approach may also be the mechanism by which consciousness and perceptual binding themselves are generated (so perhaps consciousness itself is an NP-Hard problem - which would certainly explain why current AI technology as interesting as it is, is not truly "sentient").
In the theory of Loop Quantum Gravity, spacetime is described by what are called "spinfoam networks." I've discussed in previous articles that the brain's neural networks themselves, if Dr. Penrose's theory about consciousness is correct, may actually be the physical spinfoam networks described by the theory.