/tags/lattices/ Recent content in Lattices on truegav Hugo en-us Mon, 22 Jan 2024 14:00:00 +0530 /posts/1982-paper-broke-knapsack/ Mon, 22 Jan 2024 14:00:00 +0530 /posts/1982-paper-broke-knapsack/ <h2 id="the-gift-that-keeps-on-killing">The gift that keeps on killing</h2> <p>A 1982 paper about the geometry of numbers has killed more cryptosystems than every signals intelligence agency on the planet combined. Three Dutch mathematicians published it, collected their citations, and went home. They had no idea they had just handed the world a weapon that would still be executing cryptosystems forty years later while they enjoyed retirement.</p> <p>The algorithm finds short vectors in polynomial time.</p>