A Jealous cryptanalyst
In search of a short vector
A story by Leo Ducas, Marc Stevens
and Wessel van Woerden
Once upon a time…
A cryptanalyst visited the machine learning group.
And fell in love ❤
With…
The spec sheet of their GPUs:
Or more specifically, their Tensor cores:
with 130.000 GigaFlops(fp16) of raw power.
The ML group had great stories about their use
Changing species
(CycleGAN)
Eradicating diseases
World peace
But the cryptanalyst saw only one good use:
finding a short lattice vector 
TU Darmstadt SVP Challenge
TU Darmstadt SVP Challenge
TU Darmstadt SVP Challenge
TU Darmstadt SVP Challenge
🎉 New World Record! 🎉
$d = 170, \text{seed}=0, \text{Walltime} \approx 8 \text{ days}$
[-92 -354 -573 177 387 -31 -114 -13 -316 -22 302 65 43 -195
28 -213 -187 -196 -798 321 -153 343 165 -253 -298 59 -38
468 88 -124 253 196 -518 99 449 -12 79 -382 379 287 161 67
195 -279 -206 158 -310 -256 270 301 123 71 237 326 191 -299
9 -23 46 -82 313 -206 27 -210 52 -128 135 225 130 164 -61
267 -111 426 113 149 -220 -133 45 657 -446 -605 152 -396 -245
46 -252 128 338 -55 228 644 101 -52 233 -154 232 -319 35
-339 -222 -183 -211 -173 -126 30 594 -214 89 33 263 53 -38
365 -127 4 -124 -575 65 -169 130 359 -189 381 375 -315 52
74 181 107 -604 119 423 12 -51 151 279 210 -372 380 -194 2
-91 -49 24 122 -208 -267 -288 146 -475 108 -152 -302 26 -83
-312 284 -320 -242 23 374 -403 -69 177 -11 69 -158 630 440]
And they lived happily ever after…