kyber VS kyber-k2so

I wouldn’t even be worried about the banks, any mode of encryption used for data would be at stake, but there’s already some algos that are quantum secure made by Crystal Kyber. Here’s their git repo: https://github.com/pq-crystals/kyber.git

So, question then, isn't one of the differences between this time's selection, compared to previous selections, that some of the algorithms are open source with their code available.

For example, Kyber, one of the finalists, is here: https://github.com/pq-crystals/kyber

And where it's not open source, I believe in the first round submissions, everyone included reference implementations.

Does the code being available make it easy to verify whether there are some shady/shenanigans going on, even without NIST's cooperation?

The C reference code is available: https://github.com/pq-crystals/kyber

It seems like the post-quantum algorithm that Signal selected [0] involves lattices [1] somehow:

> Kyber is an IND-CCA2-secure key encapsulation mechanism (KEM), whose security is based on the hardness of solving the learning-with-errors (LWE) problem over module lattices.

Curious to see if Chen's work will eventually lead to Signal selecting a different algorithm.

[0]: https://signal.org/blog/pqxdh/

[1]: https://pq-crystals.org/kyber/

This is pretty fascinating. For easier reading, the Signal blog post [0] they link to is great.

Both Signal and Apple went with CRYSTALS-Kyber [1] as their post-quantum algorithm. If you're interested in the math, and maybe learned at some point about how classic public key cryptography is built on the idea that it's easy to multiply two primes, but hard to factor them, and how this (or other math problems) can be used as a one-way function to make encryption hard to break, the hard math problem that backs Kyber is the "learning-with-errors" [2] problem.

[0] https://signal.org/blog/pqxdh/

[1] https://pq-crystals.org/kyber/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_with_errors

NIST has chosen to standardize Kyber, which is a Key Encapsulation Mechanism (KEM) rather than a key exchange mechanism like Diffie-Hellman:

However looks like this wasn't good enough, as the team has merged some code into the Signal protocol's library, that uses the latest NIST standard Crystals-Kyber post-quantum key exchange. I'm not sure if it's a hybrid scheme with X25519, or if it's replacing it, but damn, gotta love how the project not only innovates in terms of secure messaging protocols, but slaps the latest and greatest on top of best practice.

Kyber is one of the finalists for PQC and has an open source impl: https://pq-crystals.org/kyber/

I’d recommend looking into https://github.com/symbolicsoft/kyber-k2so -> for post quantum safety. But I’d highly recommend looking at this: https://github.com/open-quantum-safe/liboqs-go -> this library is significantly more advanced but allows for hybrid key generation so you can have post-quantum security while being at least as secure as more established cryptography schemes like Ed25519. But at very least you should move off of RSA and research current cryptography standards for file encryption.

No, none of that is true. Kyber, one of the approved encryption schemes, actually has a smaller key size than RSA and is pretty fast, around 10,000 encryptions per second on a commercial CPU. Just because it is quantum resistant doesn't necessarily mean it is "more complicated", it is just different. We have had the idea for lattice-based encryption for over 20 years now, it is not new stuff just finally being put to use due to the impending threat of quantum computers.

For reference, the Kyber algorithm selected here mentions on their website that, very conservatively, the Kyber-768 parameter set gives 128 bits of security, or roughly on the order of 31 undecillion operations to break.