|
|
|
|
|
|
by tptacek
202 days ago
|
|
|
He does a motte-and-bailey thing with the P-curves. I don't know if it's intentional or not. Curve25519 was a materially important engineering advance over the state of the art in P-curve implementations when it was introduced. There was a window of time within which Curve25519 foreclosed on Internet-exploitable vulnerabilities (and probably a somewhat longer period of time where it foreclosed on some embedded vulnerabilities). That window of time has pretty much closed now, but it was real at the time. But he also does a handwavy thing about how the P-curves could have been backdoored. No practicing cryptgraphy engineer I'm aware of takes these arguments seriously, and to buy them you have to take Bernstein's side over people like Neil Koblitz. The P-curve backdoor argument is unserious, but the P-curve implementation stuff has enough of a solid kernel to it that he can keep both arguments alive. |
|
|