Cool+Cruel = Dual

Recently [Wenger et al. IEEE S\&P 2025] claimed that the `Cool and Cruel' (C+C) approach to solving LWE with sparse secrets [Nolte et al. AFRICACRYPT 2024] outperforms other approaches, in particular the well established primal attack.

In this talk I’ll show that 1.. C+C is an instantiation of a known dual attack [Albrecht, EUROCRYPT 2017], 2.. experimental evidence that the primal attack can outperform C+C in similar regimes to those studied by Wenger et al.