I’m not really sure what the purpose of this article is except to escalate a long-running feud between DJB and Peikert in a totally inappropriate way. For conte

I’m not really sure what the purpose of this article is except to escalate a long-running feud between DJB and Peikert in a totally inappropriate way. For context: Dan has a submission to NIST’s PQC competition that has been criticized by Chris (who has a much deeper background in lattice crypto.) This kind of critical back and forth is normally a good thing, as long as it stays within the bounds of polite academic discourse. Unfortunately it has become extremely hostile and personal. To see this escalate further with Dan writing a long blog post making tenuous plagiarism accusations is just incredibly dismaying. TL;DR: people frequently miss works that are published only on ePrint servers. It appears that Peikert cited the work in a later draft and Dan disagrees with the citation. I can’t tell you whether the techniques are different: this isn’t my research area. However Dan even acknowledges that the distributions of the shared secret are different (as Peikert acknowledges in his work), but then claims this doesn’t matter in common applications. I’m not here to adjudicate what seems to be a minor question of presentation, but I would like to see much more care around something as serious as a plagiarism accusation, particularly given the personal rancor between these two.