4 ms·
Peer review isn't a panacea. It's totally possible that the NSA knows of a vulnerability or class of vulnerabilities that the rest of the peer review community
by Chaebixi 9y ago
Peer review isn't a panacea. It's totally possible that the NSA knows of a vulnerability or class of vulnerabilities that the rest of the peer review community doesn't. The cipher could be bad but still pass peer review (or it could be better than publicly known, like DES was).
In any case, it seems like the NSA was dragging its feet in trying to fully explain the designs (from the OP):
> Finally, at a March 2017 meeting in Hamilton, New Zealand, the Americans distributed a 22-page explanation of its design and a summary of attempts to break them - the sort of paper that formed part of what delegates had been seeking since 2014.
Given they're more recent history, I'd be mistrustful. It seems to me that the design of a good cipher should be done totally in the open, so any vulnerabilities are inadvertent. This includes explaining the design and the decisions and trade-offs that brought you there.
- tptacek 9y agoWhat aspects of the design do you feel needed explanation? In what sense are these not mainstream cipher designs?
- Chaebixi 9y agoI'm not a cryptographer, so I only know what's in the OP. However, it's clear important design information the ISO cryptographers wanted was being withheld by the NSA for at least 3 years.
- ethbro 9y ago> It seems to me that the design of a good cipher should be done totally in the open, so any vulnerabilities are inadvertent. This includes explaining the design and the decisions and trade-offs that brought you there. Implausible, considering that the mathematical attacks NSA is aware of but designing ciphers to be resistant to are still classified and currently being used by the NSA against older generation ciphers. See history of differential cryptanalysis and DES design. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_cryptanalysis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_cryptanalysis
- throwaway2048 9y agoThis is speculation, based upon a time when the academic cryptoanalysis community was pretty much nonexistent. I find it exceedingly unlikely that the NSA is years ahead of public efforts on this front in 2017.
- compiler-guy 9y agoI find it plausible due to the asymmetry of information flow. Everything known by the public is also known by the NSA, but the NSA only tells the public what it wants them to know. That practically guarantees that there is a lot they know that we don't. Of course that proves nothing about this specific instance, and measuring "how far ahead" in years is hard, but I think it is likely the NSA has some extremely sophisticated techniques that we know nothing about.
- ethbro 9y agoThe devil's advocate to that is offered by tptacek in other thread: that NSA's efforts are simultaneously hurt by the fact they don't openly engage with the academic cryptography community. Whereas the public community is made stronger by its interactions.