Cardano Founder Challenges Vitalik's Critique of Lattice-Based Cryptography

ME News reports that on October 9 (UTC+8), Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson tweeted that Vitalik Buterin, due to his heavy investment in hash-based cryptography research, is attempting to convince the industry that lattice cryptography is unreliable. The arguments against lattice cryptography rely solely on analogies to the General Number Field Sieve (GNFS), intuitive notions of “structure,” and unsupported claims regarding key amplification factors—none of which have been validated over the past several decades. Hoskinson pointed out that Vitalik’s post incorrectly represents the complexity of GNFS; LLL, BKZ, and sieve methods have already been incorporated into the security parameter evaluations of ML-KEM and ML-DSA, and quantum attacks on ideal lattices have not compromised these two lattice-based schemes. Hash functions also possess mathematical structures susceptible to analysis and attack—for example, Poseidon employs low-degree polynomial mappings. There is no complexity formula supporting a 10x key amplification: constant improvements correspond to proportional adjustments in dimensionality, not a fixed multiplication by 10. He further argued that, amid growing concern over “harvest now, decrypt later” threats, excessive skepticism toward already-deployed hybrid ML-KEM solutions may slow the migration to post-quantum cryptography, leaving more communication data vulnerable to future decryption by quantum computers. He acknowledged the practical value of hash-based signature schemes but noted they are unlikely to replace the common functionalities of elliptic curve cryptography. (Source: Foresight News)