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From ArsTechnica . . .
Alleged "Snake Oil" Crypto Company Sues Over Boos at Black Hat:
Grant's presentation, entitled "Discovery of Quasi-Prime Numbers: What Does this Mean for Encryption," was based on a paper called "Accurate and Infinite Prime Prediction from a Novel Quasi-PrimeAnalytical Methodology." That work was published in March of 2019 through Cornell University's arXiv.org by Grant's co-author Talal Ghannam—a physicist who has self-published a book called The Mystery of Numbers: Revealed through their Digital Root as well as a comic book called The Chronicles of Maroof the Knight: The Byzantine. The paper, a slim five pages, focuses on the use of digital root analysis (a type of calculation that has been used in occult numerology) to rapidly identify prime numbers and a sort of multiplication table for factoring primes.
[...] The Black Hat talk did not go smoothly. People had to be ejected from the room by security because they were heckling and booing Grant.
[...] Cryptographers were extremely skeptical, with some referring to the talk as "snake oil crypto." Even before the event, Mark Carney, a PhD candidate at the University of Leeds, wrote a paper refuting the claims Grant and Ghannam had made in theirs.
Well that could have gone better. Maybe the court trial will be more orderly.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Saturday August 24 2019, @11:43AM
How dare anyone say that the Emperor is naked!
I'm surprised by one little thing, though. Apparently, they're not trying to hide the details behind claims that it would be insecure to tell how it works. All this suggests that they really believe their stuff. Snake oil peddlers typically try to keep their marks in the dark, because, deep down, they know they're full of crap. In most hard sciences, it's impossible to maintain such an illusion, as there's no excuse for keeping things secret. It's not an excuse in cryptography either, but there, a lot of lay people can still be fooled into accepting such an excuse,
Over and over, I've seen that if your fantastic new method implies something incredible, like that P=NP after all, or that the principles behind the new method could be used for RSA busting, fast prime factoring or, heck, Perpetual Motion, you'd better be very, very skeptical. Don't be in a hurry to go public. Check your work for mistakes, check your programs for bugs. When you find the error, it's simultaneously unpleasant to see your dreams implode even though you suspected it was all too good to be true, and a relief that you didn't try to tell the world and end up embarrassing yourself.