Yes, my apologies. My comment was overly blunt. The reason paranoia is important in post-2013 crypto is because the NSA's knowledge of crypto is very likely a

Yes, my apologies. My comment was overly blunt. The reason paranoia is important in post-2013 crypto is because the NSA's knowledge of crypto is very likely ahead of academia / public sector knowledge. They've historically used that advanced knowledge to influence past standards. In one case, they seem to have secretly enhanced the security of DES.[1] But in another case, evidence suggests they may have secretly put a backdoor into their Dual_EC_DRBG proposal.[2] This raises the question: Should we worry about NSA tampering with proposals? If that's our goal, then it seems to me that our most powerful tool is trust: the fact that we can almost always trust tptacek, cperciva, the Mozilla Security team, and other established names. It's not that they're infallible --- rather, it's that they've always been genuine with their intentions, and have spent years building up that level of trust, so it would be a huge risk for them to be willing parties in NSA tampering. Therefore, if someone is proposing a new standard, scrutinizing their reputation would seem to be a necessary first step. If their knowledge is secretly ahead of the public sector's, and their proposal contains a secret flaw, then no one will be able to spot it. What else is there to examine if not our level of trust in their established reputation? So if we choose to believe that the NSA is ahead of public sector knowledge, then it seems like it's valid to be concerned about identity and reputation, because it's inherently impossible to rely on the public sector to spot any hidden influences in the proposal, unless the public sector happens to make the same sort of cryptographic breakthroughs that we presume the NSA to have made. I apologize for bringing it up in a disrespectful way. I didn't mean to dig into Brian's life. The LinkedIn profile just happened to stand out in a quick google search. For what it's worth, all I'm trying to do here is ask the community: should we be concerned about NSA tampering? If so, should we assume their knowledge is ahead of the public sector's? If we assume that, then what else can we do except scrutinize identity/trust (since if we assume advanced knowledge, then we can't rely solely on scrutinizing the content of their proposal)? I honestly don't know whether those are valid concerns going forward, or whether they should be taken so seriously. I'm hoping the community will decide. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard#NSA.27s_involvement_in_the_design http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard#NSA.27... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG