[chasil]

I agree with your sentiment. I wish NIST had conducted the proceedings more professionally, and this collapse in confidence is their own fault.

The OpenSSH decision to promote NTRU-prime from an experimental feature to the preferred key exchange was breathtakingly rapid, and final. It is a tacit assertion that NIST is no longer relevant.

DJB was on several teams, and I think that OpenSSH would lend greater credence to him than any other council, deservedly so.

We might end up with SPHINCS+, but I will be surprised if KYBER is adopted.

This moved very fast.

[tptacek]

I don't wish NIST had conducted the proceedings more professionally, not because I'm a nihilist about standards but because I don't know enough to critique how they ran this. I've read the whole post upthread (by the way: if you're scratching your head, the trick is to read the red text, across several pages, all the way through, and then come back and pay attention to the rebuttals you think are interesting) and don't feel any more equipped to say anything about it. What I will say is that a significant chunk of all the world's public key encryption expertise got sunk into this event.

One reason KYBER got standardized quickly is that PQC KEMs are time-sensitive if you believe the quantum attack threat is plausibly material within the next 10-15 years. Your adversary in these attacks will almost certainly be state signals intelligence groups, and the expense involved in building attack hardware dwarfs the expense of collecting traffic today to decrypt in 2034. If you're a PQC believer, you want something out the door soon.

I don't understand the special sway you think Bernstein has, versus all the other cryptographers that participate in NISTPQC, with the OpenSSH team. I worry that people believe stuff like this because they know who Bernstein is and what OpenSSH is, and don't off the top of their head know who Tancrède Lepoint is. Note also that the KYBER team includes Peter Schwabe, whose name you should definitely know if you're a Bernstan.

[chasil]

The major question will be what ends up in TLS.

Aside from adherence to DJB, the question will be what can be trusted?

We have been down this road before.

https://lwn.net/Articles/681616/

[tptacek]

Again, you're not really being asked to trust NIST here, so much as you are the CRYSTALS team. If you think the CRYSTALS team has been subverted by NSA, you're pretty far outside of the mainstream of cryptography thinkers; notably, this isn't a claim Bernstein has made, or is likely ever to make, unless someone dares him to†.

† https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10376951