Plagiarism as a patent amplifier: Understanding the delayed rollout of PQC
Brief-ish TLDR (note: I am summarizing what Daniel Bernstein says in the linked article, and make no comment on its <i>correctness</i>; this is relevant because Bernstein makes some accusations about another academic) --<p>Back in 2016, Google began an experiment with &quot;post-quantum cryptography&quot;, deploying some cryptographic algorithms in Chrome and in Google&#x27;s servers that should be resistant to attack by quantum computers. (Most present-day crypto would be very badly broken if non-toy quantum computing becomes practical.)<p>But they shut it down after a few months, even though it seemed to be working well. They&#x27;d originally said that if it went well they&#x27;d find a better algorithm and switch to it in a couple of years. So what happened?<p>Plausible answer: shortly after beginning this experiment they were contacted by a cryptography researcher (Jintai Ding) who holds a patent that allegedly covers the algorithm they were using. The easiest course of action when this happens is just to shut the thing down.<p>So how come they didn&#x27;t <i>know</i> about this patent?<p>Plausible answer: because <i>another</i> cryptography researcher (Chris Peikert) deliberately and systematically misled the academic community in order to avoid them noticing Ding&#x27;s work -- because Ding did an important thing in 2012, and Peikert did essentially the <i>same</i> thing in 2014, and Peikert wanted to take credit for inventing it. Peikert succeeded, everyone thinks he invented the relevant things first, and no one thought to check whether Ding  might have patents on it.<p>(I reiterate that I am summarizing Bernstein&#x27;s claims, and I do not know whether they are right or not.)<p>TLDR of the TLDR: according to Bernstein, a dishonest academic cryptographer went out of his way to deceive his colleagues into ignoring earlier work by another cryptographer, so as to get the credit for it himself, this led to an important patent being overlooked by Google, and this has been a completely unnecessary stumbling block in the way of getting post-quantum cryptography deployed, so that Peikert&#x27;s (alleged) selfishness and dishonesty have made everyone&#x27;s data much less safe against future quantum-computer-based attacks.