  Currently deployed public-key cryptosystems will be vulnerable to attacks by
full-scale quantum computers. Consequently, "quantum resistant" cryptosystems
are in high demand, and lattice-based cryptosystems, based on a hard problem
known as Learning With Errors (LWE), have emerged as strong contenders for
standardization. In this work, we train transformers to perform modular
arithmetic and combine half-trained models with statistical cryptanalysis
techniques to propose SALSA: a machine learning attack on LWE-based
cryptographic schemes. SALSA can fully recover secrets for small-to-mid size
LWE instances with sparse binary secrets, and may scale to attack real-world
LWE-based cryptosystems.
