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> "I may believe almost all of this is overblown and silly, as like a matter of cryptographic research ..." Am I misunderstanding you, or are you saying that y
by daneel_w 4y ago
> "I may believe almost all of this is overblown and silly, as like a matter of cryptographic research ..."
Am I misunderstanding you, or are you saying that you believe almost all of DJB's statements claiming that NIST/NSA is doctoring cryptography is overblown and silly? If that's the case, would you mind elaborating?
- tptacek 4y agoI believe the implication that NIST or NSA somehow bribed one of the PQC researchers to weaken a submission is risible. I believe that NIST is obligated to be responsive to FOIA requests, even if the motivation behind those requests is risible.
- jmprspret 4y agoI believe you have a very naive and trusting view of these US governmental bodies. I don't intend that to be an insult, but by now I think the jury is out that these agencies cannot be trusted (the NSA less so, than NIST).
- tptacek 4y agoI think you need to re-read my comment, because you have not comprehended what I just wrote.
- smegsicle 4y ago> I believe the implication that NIST or NSA somehow bribed one of the PQC researchers to weaken a submission is risible. maybe you don't know what risible means, but it reads like you're saying that the NSA "somehow" coercing someone is unlikely, which i'm sure you can agree is a "very naive and trusting view"
- tptacek 4y agoNo part of what I said had anything to do with what NSA would or wouldn't attempt to do. If you don't understand what I wrote, ask questions. What you did instead was leap to stupid conclusions.
- jona-f 4y agoYou used obscure language to make yourself look smart and deal with the resulting confusion by calling people stupid instead of clarifying what was said. Please get your ego in order.
- alariccole 4y agoThe person is saying one thing then denying saying that thing and being a jerk about it. Either a bot or someone with a broken thesaurus. Glad you pointed it out because it’s ridiculous/risible.
- kbenson 4y agoThat person is very well known in this community, and in other communities as well. They are also known for making very specific arguments that people misinterpret and fight over, but the actual intent and literal meaning of the statements is most often correct (IMO). Whether this is a byproduct of trying to be exacting in the language used that tends to cause people interpretive problems or a specific tactic to expose those that are a combination of careless with their reading and willing to make assumptions rather than ask questions is unknown to me, but that doesn't change how it tends to play out, from my perspective. In this case, I'll throw you a bone and restate his position as I understand it. NIST ran the competition in question in a way such that all the judges referred each other, and all are very well known in the cryptographic field, and the suggestion by someone with more common game that they could be bribes in this manner (note not that the NSA would not attempt it, but the implication they would succeed with the people in question) is extremely unlikely, and that DJB would suggest as much knowing his fame may matter to people more than the facts of who these people are, is problematic.
- dcow 4y agoNowhere does the comment say that the NSA "somehow" coercing someone is unlikely. Hence, it's fair question whether the comment had been comprehended, because it seems it hasn't in this thread. If comprehension begets intelligence than conclusions born from misunderstanding exude stupidity. And, dropping the pedantry, it's quite frustrating to be deliberately or casually or in whatever way misrepresented by drive-by commenters in an otherwise apt discussion thread. Your comment and the one tptacek responded to are patronizing and dismissive and really don't contribute to any interesting discourse on the topic. I think it's fair to dismiss stupid drive-by low-effort quips, personally.
- escape_goat 4y agoMaybe he does know what risible means and is in fact extremely well informed, much better informed than you are, to the point where offering sarcasm on the apparent basis of absolutely nothing but what you've learnt from the internet is actually not a valuable contribution to the conversation but instead embarrassing. Have you considered this possibility as well?
- amluto 4y agoYou said: > the motivation behind those requests is risible. It is quite hilarious that NIST suckered the industry into actually using Dual-EC, despite being worse than the other possible choices in nearly every respect. And this ignores the fact that the backdoor was publicly known for years. This actually happened; it’s not a joke. The motivation behind the FOIA requests is to attempt to see whether any funny business is going on with PQ crypto. If the NSA actually suckers any major commercial player into using a broken PQ scheme without a well-established classical scheme as a backup, that will be risible too.
- woodruffw 4y agoDual_EC keeps getting brought up, but I have to ask: does anybody have any real evidence that it was widely deployed? My recollection is that it basically didn't appear anywhere outside of a handful of not-widely-used FIPS-certified libraries, and wasn't even the default in any of them except RSA's BSAFE. The closest thing we have to evidence that Dual_EC was exploited in the wild seems to be a bunch of circumstantial evidence around its role in the OPM hack which, if true, is much more of a "self own" than anything else.
- tptacek 4y agoIt was widely deployed. NSA got it into BSAFE, which I would have said "nobody uses BSAFE, it's not 1996 anymore", but it turned out a bunch of closed-source old-school hardware products were using BSAFE. The most notable BSAFE victims were Juniper/Netscreen. Everybody who claimed Dual EC was a backdoor was right, and that backdoor was materially relevant to our industry. I couldn't believe something as dumb as Dual EC was a real backdoor; it seemed like such idiotic tradecraft. But the belief that Dual EC was so bad as tradecraft that it couldn't be real was, apparently, part of the tradecraft! Bernstein is right about that (even if he came to the conclusion at basically the same time as everyone else --- like, the instant you find out Juniper/Netscreen is using Dual EC, the jig is up).
- hovav 4y agoI don't think Juniper used BSAFE in ScreenOS -- they seem to have put together their own Dual EC implementation on top of OpenSSL, sometime around 2008. (This doesn't change your point, of course.)
- lmeyerov 4y agoI'm not sure about corrupting NIST nor corrupting individual officials of NIST, but I can easily imagine NIST committees not understanding something, being tricked, not looking closely, protecting big orgs by default (without maliciousness), and overall being sloppy. Running standards without full transparency, in my experiences of web security standards + web GPU standards is almost always due to hiding weaknesses, incompetence, security gaps of big players, & internal politics of these powerful incumbents. Think some hardware vendor not playing ball without guarantee of privacy, some Google/Apple committee member dragging their feet because of internal politics & monopoly plays. Seperately, mistakes may come from standards committee member glossing over stuff in emails because they're busy: senior folks are the most technically qualified yet also most busy. Generally not because some NSA/CIA employee is telling them to do something sneaky or lying. Still FOIA-worthy (and why I rather public lists for standards), but for much lamer reasons.
- jmprspret 4y ago> ...but I can easily imagine NIST committees not understanding something, being tricked, not looking closely, protecting big orgs by default (without maliciousness), and overall being sloppy. I agree with this. And I think that this is more likely to be the case. But I really think with all that we now know about US governmental organisations the possibility of backdoors or coercion should not be ruled out.
- tptacek 4y agoEven when you're trying to be charitable, you're wildly missing the point. I don't give a fuck about NIST or NSA. I don't trust either of them and I don't even buy into the premise of what NIST is supposed to be doing: I think formal cryptographic standards are a force for evil. The point isn't that NIST is trustworthy. The point is that the PQC finalist teams are comprised of academic cryptographers from around the world with unimpeachable reputations, and it's ludicrous to suggest that NSA could have compromised them. The whole point of the competition structure is that you don't simply have to trust NIST; the competitors (and cryptographers who aren't even entrants in the contest) are peer reviewing each other, and NIST is refereeing. What Bernstein is counting on here is that his cheering section doesn't know the names of any cryptographers besides "djb", Bruce Schneier, and maybe, just maybe, Joan Daemen. If they knew anything about who the PQC team members were, they'd shoot milk out their nose at the suggestion that NSA had suborned backdoors from them. What's upsetting is that he knows this, and he knows you don't know this, and he's exploiting that.
- daneel_w 4y agoI think it's naive and trusting only on the surface, but with some clear intent and goal underneath. In the past he has held a different stance, but it suddenly changed some time after Matasano.
- tptacek 4y agoCan I ask that, if you're going to accuse me of shilling in an HN thread, you at least come up with something that I'm shilling? I don't care what it is; you can say that I'm shilling for Infowars Life ProstaGuard Prostate Health Supplement with Saw Palmetto and Anti-Oxidant, for all I care, just identify something.
- jeffparsons 4y ago> I believe the implication that NIST or NSA somehow bribed one of the PQC researchers to weaken a submission is risible. Is that even a claim here? I'm on mobile right now so it's a bit hard for me to trawl through the DJB/NIST dialogue, but I thought his main complaint is that NIST didn't appear to have a proper and clear process for choosing the algorithms they did, when arguably better algorithms were available. So the suggestion wouldn't necessarily be that one of the respected contestants was bribed or otherwise compromised, but rather that NIST may have been tapped on the shoulder by NSA (again) with the suggestion that they should pick a specific algorithm, and that NSA would make the suggestion they have because their own cryptographers ("true believers" on NSA payroll) have discovered flaws in those suggested algorithms that they believe NSA can exploit but hopefully not adversaries can exploit. There's no need for any novel conspiracies or corruption; merely an exact repeat of previous NSA/NIST behaviour consistent with NSA policy positions. It's simultaneously about as banal as it gets, and deeply troubling because of that.
- tptacek 4y agoIt is indeed a claim here; in fact, it's probably the principle claim.
- monocasa 4y agoI guess I'm not reading it that way. In fact, a FOIA request is going after official records, which I wouldn't expect would contain outright bribery. Yes, DJB brings up their known bribing of RSA wrt to the whole Dual-EC thing. But my read of that bit of info was the more general 'here's evidence that the NSA actively commits funding towards infecting standards' rather than 'the NSA's playbook just contains outright bribery and that's what we expect to find in the FOIA requests given to NIST'.
- tptacek 4y agoThe FOIA issue is 100% legitimate. NIST is required to comply with FOIA.
- Semaphor 4y ago> risible just in case someone else never heard this word before: > arousing or provoking laughter
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ckastner 4y ago> I believe the implication that NIST or NSA somehow bribed one of the PQC researchers to weaken a submission is risible. Could you elaborate on this? I didn't get this from the article at all. There's no researcher(s) being implicated as far as I can tell. What I read is the accusation of NIST's decision-making process possibly being influenced by the NSA, something that we know has happened before. Say N teams of stellar researchers submit proposals, and they review their peers. For the sake of argument, let's say that no flaw is found in any proposal; every single one is considered perfect. NIST then picks algorithm X. It is critical to understand the decision making process behind the picking of X, crucially so when the decision-making body has a history of collusion. Because even if all N proposals are considered perfect by all possible researchers, if the NSA did influence NIST in the process, history would suggest that X would be the least trustable of all proposals. And that's the main argument I got from the article. Yes, stone-walling a FOIA request may be common, but in the case of NIST, there is ample precedent for malfeasance.
- tptacek 4y agoNobody should trust NIST. I don't even support NIST's mission; even if you assembled a trustworthy NIST, I would oppose it. The logical problem with the argument Bernstein makes about NSA picking the least trustworthy scheme is that it applies to literally any scheme NIST picks. It's unfalsifiable. If he believes it, his FOIA effort is a waste of time (he cannot FOIA NSA's secret PQC attack knowledge). The funny thing here is, I actually do accept his logic, perhaps even more than he does. I don't think there's any reason to place more trust in NIST's PQC selections than other well-reviewed competing proposals. I trust the peer review of the competitors, but not NIST's process at all.
- ckastner 4y ago> The logical problem with the argument Bernstein makes about NSA picking the least trustworthy scheme is that it applies to literally any scheme NIST picks. It's unfalsifiable. That may be true in the strict sense, but in practice, I think there would be a material distinction between a NIST process of "we defer our decision to the majority opinion of a set of three researchers with unimpeachable reputations" (a characterization from another comment) and a process of "NSA said we should pick X." In the strict sense, I can't trust either process, but in practice [edit: as an absolute layperson who has to trust someone], I'd trust the first process infinitely more (as I would absolutely distrust the second process). > The funny thing here is, I actually do accept his logic, perhaps even more than he does. That's actually what I got from your other comments to this story. But that confused me, because it was also what I got from the article. The first two thirds of the article are spent entirely on presenting NIST as an untrustworthy body based on decades of history. Apart from the title, PQC isn't even mentioned until the last third, and that part, to me, was basically "NIST's claims of reform are invalidated if it turns out that NSA influenced the decision-making process again". My vibe was that both of your positions are more or less in agreement, though I have to say I didn't pick up on any accusations of corruption of a PQC researcher in the article (I attribute that to me being a layperson in the matter).
- Jotra7 4y ago