Apparently, "[t]his suggest that the approach may be sensible, but that not all short vectors give rise to factoring relations, and that obtaining a sufficient success rate requires much larger lattice dimension than claimed in [Sch21]."
CP Schnorr is emeritus professor from Frankfurt university. He is respected for his work in cryptography. He has, pun intended, nothing to prove but still works and furthers research.
Yes, claiming that "this breaks RSA" is bold, but this implementation shows that there is some advance in doing so in the paper.
Therefore signaling that this is a "scandal" via the postfix "gate" seems just inappropriate.
Apart from that kudos for the implementation to Ducas!
Calling it the "Schnorr attack" would imply that the outcome of it is still uncertain. And it also would sound way cooler ;)
I recommend you contact Ducas to tell him about your concerns directly. I do not know him personally as I first heard about this from his public Twitter account: https://twitter.com/DucasLeo
Just to make sure you get Ducas's main argument, I quote him here again: "Personal study (unfortunately, never written down cleanly) of this approach suggested me that this approach requires solving SVP in dimensions beyond reasonable, leading to a factorization algorithm much slower than the state of the art. My impression is that this is the consensus among experts having spent some time on it as well."
So it seems like the conclusion is clear-cut contrary to what you were suggesting.
Also wouldn't the name "Schnorr attack" lead to people thinking of attacks on Schnorr signatures instead?
Regarding the importance of the degree distribution, we have pretty solid theoretical results on how it's actually the spectrum of the adjacency matrix which acts as a global metric for how well epidemics spread. I always like to recommend Ganesh et al.'s article [1] for how we came to understand this phenomenon but also Prakash et al.'s paper [2] for their theorem which holds for a very large class of epidemic models.
What's pretty interesting is that the largest eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix of an undirected graph lies between the average degree and the maximum degree so the gut feeling you get when playing with the degree of a graph is legitimate.
I will jump on the opportunity do shamelessly self-plug our most recent work [3] on how to modify the topology of a network to have the epidemic go subcritical and quickly disappear.
The basic idea in our paper is to keep the maximum number of edges from the original graph under the constraint that the adjacency spectrum is bounded. Since that's a NP-hard problem we go for an approximation algorithm.
In any case, Melting Asphalt's essays are really an example to follow! A gold standard for expository material!
Apparently, "[t]his suggest that the approach may be sensible, but that not all short vectors give rise to factoring relations, and that obtaining a sufficient success rate requires much larger lattice dimension than claimed in [Sch21]."