Business · Ars Technica
In a first, a ransomware family is confirmed to be quantum-safe
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A relatively new ransomware family is using a novel approach to hype the strength of the encryption used to scramble files—making, or at least claiming, that it is protected against attacks by quantum computers.
Key facts
- Kyber, as the ransomware is called, has been around since at least last September and quickly attracted attention for the claim that it used ML-KEM, short for Module Lattice-based Key Encapsulation
- ML-KEM is designed to replace Elliptic Curve and RSA cryptosystems, both of which are based on problems that quantum computers with sufficient strength can tackle
- The Kyber ransomware name comes from the alternate name for ML-KEM, which is also Kyber
- Rapid7 said its look under the hood revealed that, in fact, it uses RSA with 4096-bit keys, a strength that will take even longer for Shor’s algorithm to break
Summary
Kyber, as the ransomware is called, has been around since at least last September and quickly attracted attention for the claim that it used ML-KEM, short for Module Lattice-based Key Encapsulation Mechanism and is a standard shepherded by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. ML-KEM is an asymmetric encryption method for exchanging keys. On Tuesday, security firm Rapid7 said it reverse-engineered Kyber and found that the Windows variant used ML-KEM1024, the highest strength version of the PQC (post-quantum cryptography) standard. There is no practical benefit for Kyber developers to have chosen a PQC key-exchange algorithm.