4 ms·

I encourage ITNews or anyone else to point out what's suspect about Speck. It's so tiny I don't see where you can or would put the compromise.

• geggam 8y ago
  remember this guy ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden
  • tptacek 8y ago
    Yes. Now, finish the thought.
    • geggam 8y ago
      Everything the NSA and the US govt touches is suspect. Anything less is silly
      • tptacek 8y ago
        That's a non-sequitur. The commenter upthread asked how you would hide a backdoor in a tiny block cipher. Can you answer that?
        • mitchty 8y ago
          I think anyone discounting things like this should also explain what they would accept to change their views. Skepticism isn’t the same as denial, these attitudes of permanent ignorance remind me of the late nineties with Microsoft in the Linux community.
          • tptacek 8y ago
            I'm having trouble resolving the antecedents of your comment. Am I the skeptic here, or is "can't trust SPECK, NSA" person?
            • mitchty 8y ago
              Your parent comment, its directed at the person you were replying to.
        • pdkl95 8y ago
          Nobody said anything about a backdoor; the question was "what's suspect about Speck". Speck is suspicious (which includes more potential risks than just a "backdoor") because "Everything the NSA and the US govt touches is suspect". This is the same kind of security-minded heuristic as the advice that you should restore from a clean backup instead of assuming you can even know how to clean a compromised host of every rootkit/backdoor/etc. Once trust has been broken, you have to assume risks might exist until proven safe. This is why burning trust is often a very bad idea; regaining that trust takes a lot of time and effort. Also, suspicion does not require an actual risk to exist. edit: For the record, I don't know much about Speck, good or bad. It might be fine, but that's orthogonal to the NSA earning a reputation that invites suspicion.
          • tptacek 8y ago
            This is hand-waving. Backdoor, weakness, vulnerability, whatever you want to call it. What's the suggested mechanism? In fact, as another commenter here rightly points out, cryptography does not in fact run on trust; if anything, it runs on the opposite: verify.
            • pdkl95 8y ago
              > cryptography does not in fact run on trust This is true if and only if you can and have read the underlying math/algorithm. I haven't read Speck. My mother hasn't read the details of any type of crypto. So we don't have a basis for trusting Speck from first principles; we have to trust someone else for their expert opinion. You're only looking at the technical details. In the real world, approximately nobody has the time and training to do that, and we must rely at least somewhat on trust. For those purposes, the NSA is no longer seen as a trustworthy expert. (I'll point out that I haven't suggested that nobody should use Speck. Also, my opinion of it might change upon seeing some basis for trust (i.e. endorsement by other trusted experts or if I find the time to actually read the technical details myself))
              • wglb 8y ago
                This is true if and only if you can and have read the underlying math/algorithm If you are doing cryptography, you do exactly that.
      • dagenix 8y ago
        Cryptographers ought to be suspect of everything. Reputation isn't nothing, but the key part of a design is what can be proved about it, not who proposed it.
      • coatmatter 8y ago
        I think there'll be many people who would find a comment like this suspicious and question its overall validity. There's a lot of stuff the US government (and NSA) touches that isn't suspect - do we need to start making a list? Because if we do, just one item alone would invalidate the (not uncommon) point you appear to be drawing here.