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by tptacek 202 days ago
See, this gets you into trouble, because Bernstein has actually a pretty batshit take on nothing-up-my-sleeve constructions (see the B4D455 paper) --- and that argument also hurts his position on Kyber, which does NUMS stuff!
1 comments

Link?
There’s also a more approachable set of slides on the topic at https://cr.yp.to/talks/2025.11.14/slides-djb-20251114-safecu...
What do you think of those slides?
I didn’t see anything “batshit” in either the paper or the slides.
Say more. What do you think of his argument? I paraphrased it downthread. Do you think I did so accurately? If not: what did I get wrong?
I tried a couple searches and I forget which calculator-speak version of "BADASS" Bernstein actually used, but the concept of the paper† is that all the NUMS-style curves are suspect because you can make combinations of mathematical constants say whatever you want them to say (in combination), and so instead you should pick curve constants based purely on engineering excellence, which nobody could ever disagree about or (looks around the room) start huge conspiracy theories over.

as I remember it