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by zahllos
678 days ago
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This is a bit misinformed. NSA required the use of "Suite B Cryptography" for commercial vendors of government systems, which in its latest revision meant ECC. However, vendors were (and are) slow to adopt ECC from the previously used RSA. If you want public evidence of how slow such transitions can be, check any other commercial crypto like certificate authorities and see which trust chains are entirely elliptic curve. Mostly people are stuck on RSA, even though elliptic curves broadly offer better speed and smaller keys/signatures for the same or better levels of security. There's also still plenty of deployed DES and SHA-1, even though the former is inadvisable and the latter inexcusable. In fact, from what I read in the response to the NSA proposing to drop SHA-3 in favour of SHA-2 in the new PQ standards, vendors were a bit frustrated at the change because of the short timescale involved in the migration. I interpret the demanding schedule for adoption of PQC as a deliberate choice by NSA - a somewhat passive aggressive response to vendors to tell them to get their acts together, based on their experience of trying to roll out ECC. What NSA said is "if you haven't migrated to elliptic curve cryptography, you should now wait for post quantum and then start on that". You can read that message here: https://web.archive.org/web/20151123081120/https://www.nsa.g... and here is the exact quote: > For those partners and vendors that have not yet made the transition to Suite B elliptic curve algorithms, we recommend not making a significant expenditure to do so at this point but instead to prepare for the upcoming quantum resistant algorithm transition. I don't think there's much mystery here - basically it amounts to a bunch of procurement rules and guidelines. |
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