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Because you don't have to believe them or even trust them, it's maths. If their design was sound and well justified I don't see why it should be discarded. As p

by simias 8y ago

Because you don't have to believe them or even trust them, it's maths. If their design was sound and well justified I don't see why it should be discarded. As pointed out in this email it seems far from being the case however. After all AES is endorsed by the US government as well (although not designed by them, admittedly), yet we trust it because we have no reason not to. While the NSA has an obvious incentive to be able to break encryption they also have an incentive to be able to use ciphers than are fast and not easily broken. Well, I suppose ideally they'd like a cipher that only they can break, which might be what's going on here. So while I don't think NSA's proposals for a new cipher shouldn't be dismissed merely because it comes from them it should obviously be met with the highest amount of skepticism and scrutiny. No stone left unturned. Fortunately it seems that's exactly what happened there and the ciphers were rejected.

zitterbewegung 8y ago
I think you forgot the bit that AES was created by a competition involving academics while SPECK is directly from the NSA. I think that is where people are having the issue of trust due to the NSA muddying the waters with their recent behavior.
baby 8y ago
> Because you don't have to believe them or even trust them, it's maths That is not true, the only way we know how to assess a cipher's security is to basically attack it and add a margin of security on top of the best attack you find. If the NSA has built its cipher on top of a flaw that only they know, and if third party research hasn't found the flaw then we're doomed.
mtgx 8y ago
> it's maths That's a joke. First off, we don't even know how NIST obtained this "magical" large number that we're supposed to trust it creates a safe formula for the P-256 curve: y^2 = x^3-3x+41058363725152142129326129780047268409114441015993725554835256314039467401291 https://safecurves.cr.yp.to/ https://safecurves.cr.yp.to/ Second, the NSA refused to reveal certain technical details that they should have been able to reveal to the ISO: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/25/nsa_iot_encryption/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/25/nsa_iot_encryption/ So it's not all "just maths". Otherwise all of these people wouldn't be so suspicious about it. It's not all about the design, either, even if it was 100% transparent. But about how secure it actually is. We don't really know how secure an algorithm is, even as it passes a competition or standardization process. We have to see it in the real world, but once it's in the real world and everyone adopts it, it could take at least 10-15 years to get rid of it from most places. The NSA refused to reveal how Simon and Speck would resist against certain attacks. They kind of did the same with IPSEC, where they made it super-complex so that the implementers would almost always get it wrong, which means they'd leave holes in there that the NSA could exploit. This is how they muddied the waters in the standardization processes. It's their MO when they can't introduce an actual backdoor - they just design a crypto algorithm that looks okay on the surface, but hides high potential dangers: https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg12325.html https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg12... Also this seems to perfectly describe how I've already thought the NSA would act. Why would anyone ever trust them when they act like this? It's quite strange to still see so much support here despite of this: > When some of the design choices made by the NSA were questioned by experts, Ashur states, the g-men's response was to personally attack the questioners, which included himself, Orr Dunkelman and Daniel Bernstein, who represented the Israeli and German delegations respectively. > Ashur further alleged that the NSA had plied the relevant ISO committee with "half-truths and full lies" in response to concerns, and said that if the American delegation had been "more trustworthy, or at least more cooperative, different alliances would have probably been formed." > Instead, he says, "they chose to try to bully their way into the standards which almost worked but eventually backfired." https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/25/nsa_iot_encryption/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/25/nsa_iot_encryption/
- tptacek 8y ago
  The NSA didn't make IPSEC super complex; the NSA didn't design IPSEC. The IETF did a perfectly serviceable job making IPSEC inscrutable, difficult to analyze, and complicated to implement all on its own. Accomplishing stuff like that is one of the IETF's great talents.

by simias 8y ago

zitterbewegung 8y ago

I think you forgot the bit that AES was created by a competition involving academics while SPECK is directly from the NSA. I think that is where people are having the issue of trust due to the NSA muddying the waters with their recent behavior.

baby 8y ago

> Because you don't have to believe them or even trust them, it's maths That is not true, the only way we know how to assess a cipher's security is to basically attack it and add a margin of security on top of the best attack you find. If the NSA has built its cipher on top of a flaw that only they know, and if third party research hasn't found the flaw then we're doomed.

mtgx 8y ago

> it's maths That's a joke. First off, we don't even know how NIST obtained this "magical" large number that we're supposed to trust it creates a safe formula for the P-256 curve: y^2 = x^3-3x+41058363725152142129326129780047268409114441015993725554835256314039467401291 https://safecurves.cr.yp.to/ https://safecurves.cr.yp.to/ Second, the NSA refused to reveal certain technical details that they should have been able to reveal to the ISO: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/25/nsa_iot_encryption/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/25/nsa_iot_encryption/ So it's not all "just maths". Otherwise all of these people wouldn't be so suspicious about it. It's not all about the design, either, even if it was 100% transparent. But about how secure it actually is. We don't really know how secure an algorithm is, even as it passes a competition or standardization process. We have to see it in the real world, but once it's in the real world and everyone adopts it, it could take at least 10-15 years to get rid of it from most places. The NSA refused to reveal how Simon and Speck would resist against certain attacks. They kind of did the same with IPSEC, where they made it super-complex so that the implementers would almost always get it wrong, which means they'd leave holes in there that the NSA could exploit. This is how they muddied the waters in the standardization processes. It's their MO when they can't introduce an actual backdoor - they just design a crypto algorithm that looks okay on the surface, but hides high potential dangers: https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg12325.html https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg12... Also this seems to perfectly describe how I've already thought the NSA would act. Why would anyone ever trust them when they act like this? It's quite strange to still see so much support here despite of this: > When some of the design choices made by the NSA were questioned by experts, Ashur states, the g-men's response was to personally attack the questioners, which included himself, Orr Dunkelman and Daniel Bernstein, who represented the Israeli and German delegations respectively. > Ashur further alleged that the NSA had plied the relevant ISO committee with "half-truths and full lies" in response to concerns, and said that if the American delegation had been "more trustworthy, or at least more cooperative, different alliances would have probably been formed." > Instead, he says, "they chose to try to bully their way into the standards which almost worked but eventually backfired." https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/25/nsa_iot_encryption/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/25/nsa_iot_encryption/

tptacek 8y ago
The NSA didn't make IPSEC super complex; the NSA didn't design IPSEC. The IETF did a perfectly serviceable job making IPSEC inscrutable, difficult to analyze, and complicated to implement all on its own. Accomplishing stuff like that is one of the IETF's great talents.