Encrypted Email Thread Between Cryptographers Devolves Into Argument About Which Encryption To Use

An encrypted email thread between seven cryptographers at a research university, initially sent to coordinate lunch plans for Wednesday, has expanded over five days into a 43-message technical argument about the appropriate encryption standard for the email thread itself. The original message, sent by Dr. Ingrid Lattice on Monday morning, read: "Anyone free for Thai food Wednesday? The place on Fifth has a new menu." It was encrypted using PGP with an RSA-4096 key. Dr. Lattice's colleague Dr. Marcus Stream replied within eleven minutes, not to the lunch invitation, but to note that RSA-4096 is "computationally wasteful when Curve25519 provides equivalent security with superior performance characteristics." He re-encrypted his reply using the latter. Dr. Priya Entropy responded to both by pointing out that neither RSA nor elliptic curve cryptography is quantum-resistant, and that any serious cryptographer should be using a lattice-based scheme "even for lunch coordination, as a matter of principle." By Wednesday afternoon, the thread had branched into three sub-arguments: the practical timeline of quantum computing threats to asymmetric encryption, whether PGP's web of trust model remains viable in a post-Snowden world, and whether Dr. Stream's Curve25519 implementation had correctly handled clamping. No one went to the Thai restaurant. "The new menu looked really good," said Dr. Lattice, who ate lunch alone at her desk on Wednesday. "They have a green curry with tofu now. I wanted to tell everyone about it, but my reply would have required me to take a position on post-quantum key encapsulation and I just wanted curry." The thread remains active. Dr. Entropy has proposed migrating the discussion to a Signal group, which triggered a twelve-message sub-thread about the security properties of the Signal Protocol versus Matrix's Megolm protocol. The Thai restaurant has since closed for renovations. The cryptographers have not noticed.