[Cryptography] Two physics experiment questions

[Peter Gutmann]

Andrea Barontini via cryptography <cryptography at metzdowd.com> writes:

>BUT, e.g., Google in a recent paper used ZKPs to prove but not release
>publicly its improvements, which has been read a strong signal that something
>to be commercially protected begin to exist.

I've read it as a very different strong signal.  Last year Stephan Neuhaus and
I published a paper, "the dog and abacus paper", which among other things went
through all the ways people have cheated in claiming quantum cryptanalysis
records and provided evaluation criteria for legitimate claims for new
records.

(This in itself is pretty sad, we've had ~200 years of factorisation records
and it's never been necessary until now to publish a detailed set of rules to
stop people from cheating.  Since those rules were published the ongoing flow
of new claimed records seems to have stopped, although that could just be a
coincidence).

To date there has never been a single legitimate factorisation using Shor's
algorithm of a value where the factors were unknown, or alternatively a
legitimate DLP-ing of the ECC equivalent [0].  Every time someone has
announced a new record, within a matter of anything from a day to a week or
two, someone else has pointed out where the claimants cheated.

The breakthrough Google made was in figuring out how to present their claims
in a way that they couldn't be challenged.  They went to great lengths, 57
pages of it, to avoid saying what it is they'd actually done, which also means
that no-one can challenge it.

A few weeks ago I was at a talk in which someone was telling us all the
wonderful things quantum would do for us, including curing cancer.  OK, show
us quantum curing cancer then [1].

Google claim remarkable results against secp256k1.  If this is true then you
don't need 57 pages of ZKP obfuscation, you just need to publish a transaction
signed with Satoshi's key.

Peter.

[0] The Project Eleven awarding of 1 BTC, USD 40,000, to the most successful
    obfuscation of the fact that the "quantum computer" wasn't doing anything,
    was a particular highlight.
[1] To avoid getting sidetracked into a cancer discussion, quantum magic aside
    there is no "cure for cancer", see e.g.
    https://www.worldwidecancerresearch.org/cancer-and-research-information/myths-and-misinformation/why-havent-we-cured-cancer-yet/