Please note the Cryptology ePrint Archive is not a peer-reviewed source. The description of the paper may indicate another (peer-reviewed) publication, but this is entirely optional and not required for a submission.
Edit: Adding this as a PSA in case folks start debating the veracity assuming this has undergone review by experts.
To be fair, peer-reviewed publications are not what they used to be. For example, the conference reviewing process is not designed to validate correctness of the submissions. (Obviously wrong papers are filtered out most of the time, but this is a welcome side effect, not - apparently - their main objective.) See, for instance, recent Carlini's experience of reporting a demonstrably flawed paper to the chairs of a major conference: https://nicholas.carlini.com/writing/2024/yet-another-broken...
>To be fair, peer-reviewed publications are not what they used to be.
They were never what most people thought they were. At their best, they amounted to "a few relevant experts in the same field read the paper and didn't find any blatantly obvious methodological errors."
Yeah, sadly this paper is a reasonable example of the status quo. There is a contribution in there under all the cruft (if we assume a trusted leader, and we can authenticate message origin, we don't have to use Public/private key encryption to build a shared secret key, hash functions and k-of-n secret sharing are enough) it is just very narrow and they feel like they have to "dress it up" a lot.
If they actually wrote their contribution in clear terms they couldn't get it published because it sounds too simple. I think they should be able able to get it published without inflating it's complexity like this. They are just reacting to a broken system.
It’s unfair to equate this paper to obviously flawed ones since all their claims seem to be properly substantiated. Also, the protocol does not assume a trusted leader (otherwise agreement would be trivially solved).
In general, I am also not fond of this writing style. However, if one reads more papers published in this community/area, then one notices that many of them are written similarly. Since the primary audience of these papers are other researchers in the same area, they are presumably able to read past the cruft efficiently.
I also agree that academia incentivizes overselling results. In this case, however, this is a nice result and not oversold by the authors (being somewhat knowledgeable in this field).
Edit: Adding this as a PSA in case folks start debating the veracity assuming this has undergone review by experts.