Cardano Founder Criticized Buterin Over His Assessment of Post-Quantum Cryptography Risks

• Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson accused Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin of exaggerating the risks of lattice-based cryptography.
• Hoskinson said that schemes like ML-KEM and ML-DSA have undergone decades of research, and there are currently no real-world attacks that would call their security into question.
• He also warned that unfounded fears could slow the rollout of post-quantum protections.

Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson criticized Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin’s stance on the risks to cryptography posed by advances in artificial intelligence. He called the arguments against lattice-based cryptographic schemes insufficiently substantiated, and said abandoning them without concrete evidence of new vulnerabilities could harm the industry’s development.

The debate emerged after Buterin urged the industry to account for the possibility that AI could accelerate mathematical breakthroughs. At the same time, he cautioned against rushing to move funds to new wallets, and drew attention not only to ECDSA, but also to other cryptographic approaches, including ML-DSA and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE).

In Hoskinson’s view, Buterin does not sufficiently account for the results of many years of research into lattice-based cryptography. He cited examples such as the LLL and BKZ algorithms, as well as sieving methods, which researchers have considered when assessing the hardness of such schemes and selecting security parameters.

Hoskinson emphasized that ML-KEM and ML-DSA were designed with known attacks in mind. He also noted that any potential new attack must go through the standard validation process: researchers should estimate its computational cost and determine whether the parameters of cryptographic schemes need to be adjusted.

Separately, he mentioned research into quantum attacks on certain lattice variants. According to him, these results have influenced the evaluation of specific schemes, but they do not prove that ML-KEM or ML-DSA can be broken using similar methods.

Hoskinson also questioned the argument that hash-based cryptography is automatically safer due to the absence of certain mathematical structures. He pointed to the breaks of MD5 and SHA-1, and noted that the hash functions used in modern proof systems also come with their own cryptographic assumptions and potential risks.

Hoskinson warned of consequences for post-quantum protection

In the view of Cardano founder Charles Hoskinson, calls to excessively amplify fears around lattice-based cryptography could have practical consequences. In particular, he believes this could complicate the rollout of ML-KEM — a key encapsulation mechanism used in post-quantum security.

Hoskinson linked this to the risk of “harvest now — decrypt later” attacks, in which adversaries collect encrypted traffic in the hope of being able to decrypt it in the future. He noted that delaying the deployment of post-quantum mechanisms could leave more communications protected by traditional cryptography.

At the same time, Hoskinson did not dispute the appropriateness of using hash-based signatures in relevant scenarios. His criticism was primarily aimed at the idea of abandoning lattice-based cryptography without a concrete attack and a quantitative assessment of its effectiveness.

In closing, he said that assessing cryptographic risks should be based on specific attack algorithms, cost calculations, and a well-founded choice of security parameters, rather than on assumptions that artificial intelligence could accelerate mathematical breakthroughs over the next two years.

As a reminder, earlier the Cardano founder estimated the risk of a quantum threat to the crypto industry at above 50%.

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