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by tptacek 654 days ago
The (apparently) was a dunk on me.

(I thought nobody should use Dual EC! But that was my reason for thinking it wasn't an NSA backdoor, because it was too dumb to be one. I underestimated the industry's capacity for "dumb". Also: I was dumb! I am dumb a lot.)
1 comments
philodeon 654 days ago
And now you believe it’s impossible for any of the NIST PQC submissions to have been backdoored or weakened. I feel safer already. :D
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tptacek 654 days ago
NIST didn't design any of the PQC submissions. It did design Dual EC.
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philodeon 654 days ago
NIST didn’t design Dual-EC, NSA did. But NIST did the really hard work, which involved slapping their organization’s name on it, and not asking any inconvenient questions.

Thankfully we found a better way that ensures cryptographic security, which is to get former NSA interns to write the PQC standards, instead of proper NSA employees.

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tptacek 654 days ago
As a shorthand for this site, I'm not distinguishing between the two organizations. Which former NSA interns are you talking about? You can get their names from the pq-crystals.org site. Which one should we not be trusting?
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tptacek 654 days ago
Is it maybe Tancrede Lepoint? He always seemed shady to me. Or Peter Schwabe?
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philodeon 654 days ago
A wonderful question that exposes me to legal action if I answer.

A better question: why do you think so many of your cryptographic feline friendz were so excited about isogenies for the past decade? Where do you think they all obtained that identical enthusiasm from? Why do you think SIKE made it so far in the contest and only got eliminated through luck?

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tptacek 654 days ago
Your theory here is that NSA coordinated an action whereby the PQC standard selected could be broken by anybody in the world with a Python script, based on research disclosed to the public in the 1990s.

I'm guessing this isn't a conversation that's going to take us into Richelot isogenies.

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lvh 654 days ago
I don't know if I count as a "feline friend", but: SIDH kept the DH shape. Being able to upgrade the protocols we had relatively closely is appealing. "Structure is useful but seems precarious" wasn't exactly secret knowledge.
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dadrian 654 days ago
Of the SCW hosts, I'm actually the NSA plant. You got me.
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