The two most important things to understand about this kerfuffle:
(1) MLKEM wasn't designed by NSA, but rather by a team of highly-regarded European academic cryptographers, including Bernstein's former collaborator Peter Schwabe; their submission, Kyber, was selected in an open competition in which Bernstein himself submitted a closely-related algorithm (and then contested the result, suing NIST for documents to clarify the selection.)
(2) The RFC at issue documents the possibility of running TLS with pure MLKEM rather than in a hybrid configuration with ECDH. Hybrid TLS is already the mainstream, documented, standardized method for using PQC in a TLS connection. Bernstein is canvassing opposition to any documentation of the possibility of pure MLKEM in TLS.
Every time Bernstein talks about NSA's sordid history, remember: nothing that's happening here has really anything to do with NSA. It would make more sense for Bernstein to be canvassing against SHA2, which NSA actually did design. But he can't do that, because normal people know enough about cryptography to understand how crazy a claim that is. Unfortunately, we can't yet say that about lattice cryptography, despite it being approximately as well-studied as ECC.
> (2) The RFC at issue documents the possibility of running TLS with pure MLKEM rather than in a hybrid configuration with ECDH. Hybrid TLS is already the mainstream, documented, standardized method for using PQC in a TLS connection. Bernstein is canvassing opposition to any documentation of the possibility of pure MLKEM in TLS.
Two more pieces of context here:
1. The IETF allows code point registrations based purely on the existence of a specification, and the pure ML-KEM code points have already been assigned (https://www.iana.org/assignments/tls-parameters/tls-paramete...). The question at hand is whether the IETF will publish an RFC documenting the ML-KEM cipher suites [edited to make clear that ML-KEM is documented already].
2. It is also possible to publish an RFC via what's called "Independent Submission" (https://www.rfc-editor.org/authors/rfc-independent-submissio...), which is not subject to the IETF Consensus process. This is, for instance, how the GOST RFC (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9367/) was published. If the IETF opts not to publish this draft, the authors can still submit it to the Independent Submissions Editor.
Further the draft that this is all about does not make a recommendation for its use. The currently IETF-recommended TLS algorithms are: X25519MLKEM768, x448, x25519, secp384r1, secp256r1.
As noted by someone on the IETF list [1] there are already ML-KEM-only implementations in various libraries, so if we want interoperability then it's best to have a standard document. No one is forcing anyone to use this algorithm, and it's not even 'officially' recommended (per above).
I recall the early-to-mid-90s when the IETF was a powerhouse, churning out foundational standards and documents monthly, and every time I read a foundational RFC for some protocol I wanted to learn, the "Security Considerations" section was intentionally left completely blank and un-considered.
I don't know if it was recklessness or expediency or a very calculated tactic (the Internet was invented by DARPA, after all) but Internet protocols were so ridiculously insecure, and based on absurd trust models that were repeatedly broken, and everything always transmitted in plaintext (because, of course, all networks were physically wired, secured, and only the good guys could tap into them).
It was an absolute Wild West clown college as the Internet transitioned to commercial and privatized use cases, and I suppose it guaranteed job security for generations of cybersecurity experts and cryptographers.
> there are already ML-KEM-only implementations in various libraries, so if we want interoperability then it's best to have a standard document
“People are already doing it, so we might as well rubber-stamp it even if it’s not great” introduces problems of its own: people will perceive that rubber-stamping as validating it, and now they’ll use it even more, where perhaps if you held back, they wouldn’t.
(There are counter-arguments as well, of course. A couple of relevant cases that spring to mind where a body has not aligned with usage or expectations: W3C lost control of HTML, and it was probably for the best, but they remain a relevant body in closely-related areas; and OSI licence approval is a horribly broken political process which is almost universally misunderstood and close to frozen in time, yet they haven’t suffered like they should have for their misdeeds, they pretty much got away with it. There was also that thing somewhat recently about FedRAMP rubber-stamping Microsoft Cloud despite it failing dismally, because US government agencies had already started using it too much; and I wonder what that does to their credibility.)
This is also a concern with informational/independent submissions through IETF. They are frequently perceived as having IETF/standards weight.
These are arguments, but I don't really understand what they're arguments for. At issue here is whether or not the IETF should document usage of pure-MLKEM TLS. There are environments where people are going to use pure-MLKEM TLS, whether Bernstein likes it or not. His argument is that the IETF should pretend that isn't happening, and throw up weird procedural obstacles to it.
I know approximately nothing about the specific case here, and don’t believe I have any skin in the game. I intended my comment purely abstractly: I’m not commenting on anything technical, merely mentioning a procedural concern: that the line I quoted can sound reasonable, but that I don’t think it’s actually a reasonable argument by itself, because of the likely consequences of such actions. (That is: if that happened to be the only argument—though I doubt it is—there’s a compelling case for rejecting it.)
> “People are already doing it, so we might as well rubber-stamp it even if it’s not great” introduces problems of its own: people will perceive that rubber-stamping as validating it, and now they’ll use it even more, where perhaps if you held back, they wouldn’t.
The GOST cipher, which is Russia's AES equivalent, is also in an RFC:
The GOST document is categorized in the same way as the one currently being debated/discussed: Informational. It also has "N" under the "Recommended" column (like ML-KEM-only will have):
In fairness, I do think that this situation is somewhat different. As I noted above (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48812792), there are two main routes to an Informational RFC of this kind.
* Through the IETF
* Through the Independent Stream
The GOST documents went through the Independent Stream and therefore do not have IETF imprimateur. These documents are proposed for the IETF Stream and therefore require IETF Consensus to publish.
I know this is all super confusing. The basic problem is that the vast majority of RFCs come out of the IETF and so people often act as if all RFCs do. This is of course in part why people pursue Independent Stream publication rather than just publishing things on their own..
> The question at hand is whether the IETF will publish an RFC documenting the ML-KEM.
The IETF document only documents how and where to put the MLKEM values into TLS. MLKEM itself is specified in FIPS203 and it just references that for the actual cryptographic details. The IETF document is in fact quite short:
You are simplifying ad absurdum. The NSA is as likely to compromise hash and signing algorithms as the police are likely to recommend pissing in petri dishes to cast doubt on that troublesome forensic science. The NSA likely has orders more experience with the area of cryptography Kyber comes from than everyone who worked on Kyber. Estimates at one point were that they had more than half of appropriate PhD level Mathematicians in the US, that may have gone down with more cryptocurrency firms, etc, but those firms are not researching algorithm families that may or may not replace the standards with all that much interest.
He didnt say it did, he said "The NSA likely has orders more experience with the area of cryptography Kyber comes from than everyone who worked on Kyber"
Yes, and strongly argued against lattice schemes generally. DJB submitted a lattice scheme under the theory that if the advocates of lattice schemes were able to win the argument about the performance properties then there should be a choice of an extremely conservatively designed one.
DJB himself has consistently advocated for Classic McEliece in any application which can accept its performance characteristics (which are excellent except for the ginormous public keys), and spent many bytes trying to convince people that the set of applications that can is wider than they suspect.
No, it's not an absurd claim. Lattice key establishment goes back into the mid-1990s, and was at one point a serious contender for the alternative-to-RSA/FFDH algorithm that ECC became. Modern LWE lattice KEM is approximately at the same point in its lifecycle (say, compared to original NTRU) as Curve25519 was to ECDH.
It does not matter much how long it goes back, because before its standardization very few people have bothered to study it.
Like for any other cryptographic algorithms, where one or more decades were necessary for a good understanding of their properties, we can expect much more relevant publications about lattice key establishment in the next years, than until now.
this is entirely wrong. Lattice-based cryptography has been extremely well-studied theoretically and practically, even before standardization. For example, a (hybrid) lattice-based KEM was (experimentally) deployed in Chrome in 2016.
one or more decades were required to get good understanding of the relevant lattice problems. But they were introduced in
* the ~1990s, for NTRU, and
* ~2005, for LWE, and
* ~2012, for RWLE
ironically, of all of them LWE is probably understood the best (though our understanding of LWE, RLWE, and MLWE are all roughly similar now). This is because it is a problem more amenable to understanding than NTRU, which is (by comparison) a little more "ad hoc".
For lattice-based KEMs, we also have very strong understanding of things. Roughly, we were able to design the lattice-based KEMs based on our prior understanding of general KEMs. Concretely, we had a much better understanding of the precise details of the FO transform, which fed into teh design of lattice-based KEMs. So most lattice-based KEMs solely had to construct a lattice-based PKE. Doing so from LWE is fairly straightforward. Iirc since ~2005 there was a certain technique known, and then a more optimized technique was developed in ~2011. All lattice-based KEMs (that construct IND-CPA PKE -> FO Transform -> IND-CCA2 PKE) proceed with this ~2011 technique, with various internal knobs tweaked.
Post-standardization there has been some additional research into lattice-based KEMs, but they have (generally) been proceeding by tweaking the core ~2005 hardness assumption to try to get more efficiency. It's an interesting idea, but generally hardness assumptions take the longest time to gain confidence out of any part of a cryptographic algorithm (as they're the only unprovable part), so it might be a bit before we feel "safe" regarding them.
the McEliece cryptosystem goes back to the 70s, doesn't mean it's as well studied as RSA. obviously people study popular cryptographic primitives more.
having said that, I would trust McEliece more than Kyber.
This doesn't hit classic McEliece yet, but is part of a line of work that Randriambololona has been doing, which are at a minimum very concerning for the security of McEliece.
certainly a concern, and a good reason to use multiple cryptosystems together. unfortunately there are probably similar papers for Kyber which are NSA property and will never see the light of day. they do employ a lot of mathematicians.
for applications where key exchange need not be particularly fast or compact, I would even throw in 4096 MP-RSA in (tuned to whatever size the exchange can tolerate) as a hedge against that if a CRQC is even possible, it would be able to continue to grow in size quickly or at all.
Because NIST chose it, after non-public input from the NSA. But if I am honest, NIST recommending it at all is enough to suspect it of being compromised. I say that as an American, and my non-american friends equally don't trust NIST on crypto topics.
The real problem I have is best described as I haven't read a single coherent argument responding to and rejecting the real concerns raised by the individual who after nist betrayed the internet with by recommending a compromised standard at the encouragement of the NSA. Is the person who wrote the crypto library everyone uses.
DJB puts his money (time) where his mouth is. I would critique his attachment to his own ego. But I'm in the group of people who haven't contributed enough yet to foss to get to throw stones. So I'll defer to people who can match his contributions. Until that happens, DJB's reputation is cares passionately about crypto and it's community, vs an US government group with a reputation for trying to sabotage crypto systems after passing secrets with the NSA, who refuses to provide details about their most recent secret messages.
I do find some of the arguments and refutations from the mailing lists compelling. But not all the them, and nothing directly from NIST. Equally some of DJB's appear to weaken his points. But like I said, I plan to trust the reputation each party has earned.
NIST has a history of behaving inappropriately, and unethically around it's cryptography recommendations. But the people currently in charge would rather pretend they're above it and not literally directly responsible for the organization with a well earned reputation. If you're given a 2nd chance after your partner catches you cheating, it's a reasonable requirement that you account for every second of your time, until you restore the reputation you destroyed.
DJB is not just a mathematician looking over theoretical equations. He's also an expert in the real world _implementation_ of cryptography where most security failures can be expected to occur.
For some mathematician's brilliant cryptography scheme, how easy would it be for implementers to develop constant time / constant power computer algorithms to avoid side channel leakage? Have these computer algorithms been developed, are they easy to implement securely or are implementers going to continually mess it up?
See [1] and [2] for answers. Summary: Technology is not ready.
He's a cryptographer. You're describing cryptographers. You get that other cryptographers designed Kyber/MLKEM, and still more implemented it, right? There are cryptographers besides Daniel J. Bernstein.
I do think it's fair to make an argument that DJB's expertise in practical cryptography (both in e.g. engineering against side channel attacks as well as in publishing his own libraries) gives him a reality-minded perspective/attitude.
That said, personally speaking, his behavior as a software publisher (packaging & whatnot) is something I'd call… let's go with "subpar" and leave it at that. So while I do believe it's a fair argument, I'm not accepting it, because from my perspective he isn't putting in the necessary work to really understand software publishing.
Bernstein as a "software publisher" cannot really be compared with anyone else, because what can be considered as great flaws in comparison with others are compensated by equally great advantages.
He has published a very large quantity of open-source software, but after publication he never bothered with any kind of maintenance, which is understandable, because he went on doing other work.
On the other hand, unlike almost any other software packages, those published by him almost did not need any maintenance. The only required changes, after decades since they were written, have been caused by external changes, e.g. the continuous evolution and instability of the Linux APIs and the replacement of various IETF RFCs.
I am still using several software packages written by DJB, which have been run continuously 24/7 for more than a quarter of century, on many servers, without ever causing any kind of problems or incidents, unlike a lot of much more notorious software packages, which had various bugs despite permanent maintenance.
Huh, seen through that light, it's much clearer why we should all have ECC in our cryptosystems, because nothing has ever gone wrong with an ECC implementation.
Not all cryptographers (and cryptography standards) care about real world implementation, or have the same use cases in mind for their cryptography algorithms and protocols. Almost every cryptography standard in common use treats side channel resistance as an optional after-thought for implementers. This might be fine for some users, for example, the US government, because they generally don't implement cryptography on systems an attacker would have physical access to, and don't use cryptography protocols on public networks. For these users, having maximum performance at the expense of side channel resistance might be the best trade-off to make.
For most users however, side channel resistance is a very important property that shouldn't be considered an optional after-thought. If standards bodies made it mandatory to consider side channel resistance when standardising cryptography schemes, the choice of what scheme(s) to standardise could look quite different, and thus general use of cryptography would have improved security by default. If some types of users don't care about side channel resistance, then great, make use of non-side-channel-resistant cryptography optional for them to use. Don't standardise it the other way around.
For example:
FIPS 186-5 sB.1 states: "Other (constant time) algorithms that produce an equivalent result may be used."[1]
NIST SP 800-186 sE.4 states: "If one is concerned about side-channel leakage, one should compute the inverse using a constant-time algorithm."[2]
RFC 8032 s8.1 states: "Note that the example implementations in this document do not attempt to be side-channel silent."[3]
A better standard may, for example, _require_ [4] be implemented in order for an implementation to claim conformance with the standard. Not as an optional after-thought. If there are users wanting to trade off side channel resistance for performance gains, then write a new standard to that effect and remove the requirement to implement [4].
A better standardisation process may, for example, only accept candidate algorithms _if_ they are side channel resistant. This opens up the standard to as many use cases as possible. No cutting corners to pretend performance is better for one implementation because it trades off side channel resistance for performance, and no pretending side channel sensitive use cases don't exist.
I, for one, wouldn't care if Kanye West or his aunt or her neigbours dog came up with a good encryption algo. If it's good, it's good no matter who wrote it. Appeals to authority or the lack thereof draws attention away from the technical debate.
Unfortunately, that's not how modern crypto works. Many mathematical problems on which algorithm rests their security are not proven to be unsolvable, but instead they're believed to be hard to solve. So here are the questions, who believes what is hard, and hard for whom.
Somehow I wouldn't trust my data on mathematical problems, for which the recommendation is that they would challenge Kayne West.
I certainly find it fascinating that the majority of those in favor come from signal intelligence agencies, while the majority of those against are PhD cryptographers.
I was happy to see the lead of Europe’s PQC team also voted with the cryptographers.
I might have expected you'd be once bitten twice shy after having once taking an aggressive position that DUAL-EC would never have backdoored anyone in practice...
The optionality of MLKEM by itself is of a similar shape to standardizing a lame DRBG that 'obviously' no one would use and anyone who would use would use the appendix parameter generation scheme that would have rendered it secure (although still slow). The reality of it was that once it was standardized NSA was able to secretly compel its use.
On one hand MLKEM by itself seems like a better choice than DUAL-EC, on the other hand that fact should make it much easier for a powerful attacker to cause a target to use it if you do have an attack that exploits this fact.
MLKEM was selected out of myriad other options through a NIST process which was directly influenced by NSA (including in manners that NIST failed to disclose and actively mislead the group about). I think this makes the commentary regarding NSA highly relevant. While it seems less like that NSA already knows of a total break in MLKEM (and indeed their influence could have been in a strengthening direction...) it's possible that their influence was motivated by things like that ease of undetectably compromising specific implementations through techniques like dopant adulteration or specialized side channel weaknesses.
If your plan it to tamper with chip mfgr or hit them with a very well aimed e-beam (e.g. to cause ion migration) after the fact then having a non-hybrid scheme is pretty obviously going to make your life much easier... Or perhaps they've taken a route similar to the one they took with Crypto AG-- this time positioning themselves as a fabless silicon vendor to sell MLKEM RTL to a market that doesn't have an implementation but already has many robust ECC implementations to choose from.
...and that's without getting into the unknown possibility of a cryptoanalytic breakthrough.
I don't think it's even safe to say that NSA would only consider NOBUS backdoors-- I don't think any of us can know how inadvisably arrogant the relevant decision makers may be and what they might consider NOBUS. Given how DUAL_EC went in Netscreen's products I think it's reasonable to argument that there is no such thing as a NOBUS backdoor when push comes to shove. Capping DES's key size is candidate example of a very much non-NOBUS weakness that NSA felt comfortable with, as one needed a particularly amount of strength to exploit it which they believed that only they had. Today, of course, a child's video game device can crack DES as a direct product of that part of their influence.
Not a great track record when fear of "store and decrypt later" attacks is much of what motivates the use of PQ key agreement today.
The consistent aggression five-eyes affiliated cryptographic-intelligence groups have had for hybrid schemes is truly difficult to comprehend-- given that practically everyone else considers them obviously prudent in all cases where the resource costs permit -- and I think this justifies the utmost concern and caution. And in terms of caution hybrid schemes are table stakes.
A major theme of DJB's cryptographic security advocacy is that cryptographic security is often as much about what you don't offer as it is what you do. A completently engineered security product is misuse resistant and it's not completely clear to me that a standard which offers the choice of a non-hybrid mlkem qualifies as misuse resistant.
That said, there are plenty of drafts that are in no way misuse resistant. :)
None of this makes any sense once you understand that NSA had no hand in designing MLKEM, or in shaping the LWE research that led to it. NSA designed Dual-EC. MLKEM won an open competition; its entrants are among the most reputable cryptographers in the world.
Post selection is also design. Evolution by natural (or artificial, for that matter) selection works by post-selection.
I'm happy to agree that it affords much less degrees of freedom than original design, but the irrelevance argument depends on no influence rather than a lack of absolute influence.
it's worth clarifying that its entrants were all qualified, and 2 other essentially identical schemes, namely New Hope and Saber, made it very deep into the NIST competition.
All 3 (roughly) took the approach of
1. take the obvious best design, and
2. tweak various internal design knobs you have access to, and
3. that's pretty much it.
So they differ in the internal design knobs they chose. But the fact that 3 independent teams all created something substantially similar to ML-KEM should be an indication of how much harder it would be for the NSA to be behind it.
DJB has orchestrated a vote rigging campaign against this WGLC, encouraging users to join the list and vote/express their opinion and providing the exact subject header to use. Have any other sides been saying, essentially, just join the group and say you’re for/against?
He’s been moderated during the last call because of his email disclaimer/footnote, and apparently refuses to respond on list during this time. Seems like he’s playing a few steps ahead where he can (yet again) cry foul on the system and cry foul on vote rigging. Despite him being a key instigator. I’ve already seen at least one poster reference a RFC explaining how IETF consensus works and how its not a pure numbers game (5 for and 100 against can still be consensus, depending on the circumstances; the inverse also applies).
What’s his next step if the authors publish as an information RFC? He can’t stop that, right?
> What’s his next step if the authors publish as an information RFC? He can’t stop that, right?
This is a slightly complicated question. There are several main routes to an Informational RFC.
* Through the IETF Stream, either through the Working Group (what is happening now) or via sponsorship by an Area Director. The former is what is happening now (this document is not up for Proposed Standard). I don't think the latter is likely to happen if TLS WG decides not to publish. If the TLS WG does decide to publish, then there are a number of steps afterward (AD review, IETF Last Call, IESG Review), plus potential avenues for appeal at some of these stages.
* Through the Independent Submissions Editor (ISE) (though in another comment wbl says that the ISE is not going to publish cryptography standards https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48812844). This is essentially at the sole discretion of the ISE and can't be appealed.
In either case, if the document makes it through all these gates and is eventually published as an RFC, then that's pretty much it, as RFCs aren't changed once published.
Thanks for the clarification. It’s a bit of a shame as going via ISE would have let the group move onto other endeavours. Maybe people will just refer to the draft name and that’s that.
Informational RFCs still need to pass through the IETF consensus process, changing the intended status isn't a procedural bypass. However, the authors can just publish it elsewhere, it makes no difference at all for the codepoint allocations. Only distinction is that it doesn't get the somewhat intangible (but existent) "RFC sheen".
"The quantum-safe mechanisms recommended in this Technical Guideline are generally not yet trusted to the same extent as the established classical mechanisms, since they have not been as well studied with regard to side-channel resistance and implementation security. To ensure the long-term security of a key agreement, this Technical Guideline therefore recommends the use of a hybrid key agreement mechanism that combines a quantum-safe and a classical mechanism."
The french position, also quoting the German position:
"As outlined in the previous position paper [1], ANSSI still strongly emphasizes the necessity of hybrid wherever post-quantum mitigation is needed both in the short and medium term. Indeed, even if the post-quantum algorithms have gained a lot of attention, they are still not mature enough to solely ensure the security"
ML-DSA -- Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Algorithm
solo PQ -- Using post-quantum crypto on its own
ECC+PQ -- Using post-quantum crypto as a layer on top of traditional elliptical curve cryptography (ECC)
So what's at stake here, is that the PQ crypto is not proven yet, and had recent implementation vulnerabilities (Kyberslash 1 & 2).
In the NSA's defense, combining cryptosystems also creates attack surfaces, timing problems, additional complexity, etc. Perhaps they know something we don't. They have sometimes acted to strengthen public cryptography, as with the DES S-boxes and differential cryptanalysis. Of course, they also weakened the key-space...
1. Kyberslash is mostly marketing. Some implementations (including the Kyber reference implementation, but *not* including the Kyber AVX implementation) had a non-constant time component. This is a meaningful CVE. It is not some fundamental weakness that should cause a panic. Note that the non-constant time implementations were caught ~2 years ago, prior to any deployment. So it was a sign of everything going "as expected", not of some new fundamental issue.
2. combining the cryptosystems, in most settings, is rather low cost. I would personally recommend it as a sensible default. It is not low cost in every setting though, for example in hardware it necessitates both a SHA2 and SHA3 impl, which is fairly expensive. So while hybrids are a sensible default, I would not go as far as to attempt to "ban" use of pure ML-KEM.
3. pure ML-KEM is much more "proven" than people are discussing. The core hardness assumption dates back to 2005, and has been intensely studied (the paper introducing it got a cryptography version of a Nobel prize (Godel prize), as did several follow-up works only achievable using that hardness assumption. The essential components of ML-KEM were proposed in ~2011. An extremely similar scheme (New Hope) was deployed experimentally in a hybrid in Chrome in 2016. Very concretely, the best theoretical attacks on ML-KEM take time ~2^cn for a c that has not changed in the last ~decade. Everything is as boring as you might hope.
On essentially any reasonable measure you could ask for, things have been "stable" with ML-KEM for ~1 decade. In the intervening years, a number of academics/companies have devoted a great deal of money on things built from even more sketchy hardness assumptions (I'm discussing the things underlying Fully Homomorphic Encryption). Even these have been essentially fine (I have some personal quibbles with some assumptions used, though they are technically dense, and are not relevant to ML-KEM in the slightest). So this is to say that there are natural "easier instances" of the thing underlying ML-KEM, and there still haven't been successful attacks of those instances.
Anyway though, the question isn't "should you use pure ML-KEM rather than hybrid". I would personally suggest hybrid unless it is extremely limiting for some particular scenario (and there are scenarios, such as hardware, where it is). The question is "should we standardize how pure ML-KEM TLS works, so implementors can create interoperable implementations?".
The answer to this should (clearly) be yes. ML-KEM is boring, high-quality cryptography. If a quantum computer appeared tomorrow, and only ML-KEM protected me, I would not lose any sleep personally. Efforts to delay standardization rely on "arguments" that do not match reality in the slightest.
> pure ML-KEM is much more "proven" than people are discussing. The core hardness assumption dates back to 2005, and has been intensely studied (the paper introducing it got a cryptography version of a Nobel prize (Godel prize), as did several follow-up works only achievable using that hardness assumption.
The inventor of the lobotomy won a Nobel Prize in Medicine for it.
huh. I really wouldn't want the Nobel Prize committee in medicine doing cryptographic work then. good thing your comment has nothing to do with cryptography then :)
> Secret NSA documents showed that NSA pushed DES in the 1970s to "drive out competitors" while knowing that DES was "weak enough" to break; meanwhile NSA publicly claimed that it would use DES
Is this true? The NSA pushed for weaker cryptography it could break versus stronger cryptography our adversaries couldn't?
note that there is no even candidate way the NSA would have a NOBUS-type vulnerability for ML-KEM. DUAL_EC_DRBG was known to plausibly have a NOBUS-style backdoor prior to standardization, provided you used a certain "default" generator (vs freshly generating your own). It was later discovered that the NSA payed RSA (the company) to do this.
While this payment was private, the possibility of a back door was publicly known. There are no publicly known candidate backdoors for ML-KEM. The broad design of an ML-KEM-like scheme permits one ("static" matrix A), but ML-KEM was specifically designed to make this impossible ("ephemeral" matrix A).
To those who say that approving or not this RFC won't make any difference:
«- Liaisons: We received liaison statements from multiple SDOs including O-RAN[2], IEEE 802.11[4] and from 3GPP[3] expressing support for the publication of draft-ietf-tls-mlkem as an RFC as they rely on the IETF to provide a stable normative reference»
If the link goes down, the content is available in many other places across the web under the title "The Gentleman's Guide To Forum Spies (spooks, feds, etc.)"
DJB keeps calling the IETF consensus process "voting". That's detrimental to his own case; when there is a vote, the vote can be manipulated. It makes much more sense to argue there is no consensus, which should be quite obvious at this point, and which can be argued even in a "60:40" situation regardless of direction. It also avoids alienating "true IETF believers" (ed.: I am one).
Apart from that, the crux of this is the codepoint allocation in the named group registry. [https://www.iana.org/assignments/tls-parameters/tls-paramete...] The requirement for that allocation (with "recommended=N" - which is what this draft has) is "Specification Required", not "IETF consensus". "Specification" for IANA registries doesn't mean IETF documents, it means:
[…] must be documented in a permanent and readily
available public specification, in sufficient detail so that
interoperability between independent implementations is possible.
As such I don't understand why the authors are so intent at ramming this through the IETF process when they could just put the same document whereever. The process has been sufficiently and publicly fraught enough to destroy any "reputation" that might (or might not) come associated with it being published as IETF RFC.
[ed.: referenced wrong registry, it's named groups, not cipher suites. Makes no difference, same registration procedure.]
FTR, the only [preliminary] entry with recommended=Y for PQ crypto is:
4588 X25519MLKEM768 Combining X25519 ECDH with ML-KEM-768 https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-tls-ecdhe-mlkem-05
[ed.2: this is getting a funky spread of up & down votes, any of the downvoters mind commenting why they're downvoting?]
Adding a little color here... There are already code points registered for pure ML-KEM on the basis of the draft.
The hybrid code point you reference is "preliminary" in the sense that when the RFC for hybrid ECC/ML-KEM is published (it's already been approved, https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-tls-ecdhe-mlkem/), it will replace the reference in the registry. However, it will have the same code point and the same semantics. If, for some reason, the IETF were to change the semantics, a new code point would have to be assigned for interop reasons.
Actually… what would even be the result of the pure MLKEM document getting dropped by the IETF? I guess the entries would temporarily be marked deprecated or something, until another reference is made available somewhere, describing the same behavior? I'm not sure what procedural blockers this might run into but my general sense is that the IETF & IANA wouldn't "block off" the already allocated codepoints from being specified elsewhere (or allocate new duplicate codepoints) so long as the behavior is identical.
If the document is dropped by the IETF, nothing at all would happen. It's already a valid code point registration, and indeed the authors could have just published the document, registered the code points, and stopped (see: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-barnes-tls-this-could...).
If the authors decided to later pick up the document somewhere else, then they could probably get the reference changed to whatever that was, as long as the semantics were identical.
The issue with saying that "there's a 60/40 split, therefore there's no consensus" is that the IETF explicitly documents that that isn't the case: RFC 7282, Section 7, "Five people for and one hundred people against might still be rough consensus" (https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7282#section-7).
The working group chairs have to decide if all of the objections have been "addressed". However, "addressed" doesn't mean "fixed via changes in the document", it can also mean "debunked on the mailing list" or "dismissed out of hand as irrelevant". So your argument that there obviously isn't consensus doesn't actually hold up.
What I said was "It makes much more sense to argue there is no consensus […] can be argued even in a "60:40" situation regardless of direction".
Not "there's a 60/40 split, therefore there's no consensus".
Can be argued even in. That's a statement of allowance, not sufficiency. And I was speaking in the context of contrasting against a vote. You can't argue with a vote's tally.
Sadly, a similar myth/fallacy persists about the Wikipedia consensus process (at least the English project and others deriving policy from it.)
Participants in disputes and RFCs literally call their comments “!vote” in true hacker notation, to repeatedly and clearly emphasize that “vote count” is never a factor in the process of establishing consensus.
(Elections are, however, regularly held, and votes counted, for positions such as Administrator, and the ArbCom seats, but that’s for people, not article content.)
From the way DJB talks about IETF processes, it's quite clear to me though that he has little trust/belief in the IETF consensus process. I thought he said as much somewhere but can't find that right now. (It's particularly obvious in https://blog.cr.yp.to/20260405-votes.html)
Which is why I'm noting the alienation of "IETF believers", which I should maybe clarify I count myself as. The IETF is a lot of people doing a lot of good work. It does include a bunch of questionable actors, anything from ignorant, incompetent, ulterior motives, to outright malicious. But all in all it has brought us the internet as it exists today and I can't help feeling a little, well, alienated by DJB's writs.
Anyway, IETF hasn't attempted to issue such a rule. On the contrary, IETF claims that WG decisions are not taken by voting: "Decisions within WGs, as with the broader IETF, are taken by 'rough consensus' and not by voting." This begs the question of what IETF thinks "rough consensus" means. Letting chairs make arbitrary decisions is a violation of due process.
More to the point, IETF can't override the definition of "consensus" in the law. That definition requires general agreement. Adoption of this draft was controversial, and didn't reach general agreement.
DJB making legal-ish arguments (or the idea that the IETF could be sued over a definition of "rough consensus") is absolutely inane to me. The choice of words of the IETF in defining its own processes for itself is not a legal one. And apart from that, which country's laws would that be? (I'm also quite skeptical about such a definition existing in a relevant manner to begin with.)
He famously doesn't support the IETF. In the long-long-long ago, back when I had a "home page" with my username and a tilde in it, I used to have a quote from him on it about the IETF and "ego standards". He's been picking fights like this with different IETF working groups for basically his entire career. This isn't even the first time he's picked a huge fight with IETF cryptography groups; he managed to get Kenny Paterson to publicly take him to task on the CFRG a few years back.
I, too, don't support the IETF (hence the quote on the web page, which I can't find now). But I happen to know enough about the people involved in this particular drama that I can see through his arguments here, and whether he realizes it or not, he's operating in supremely bad faith this time.
> whether he realizes it or not, he's operating in supremely bad faith this time.
I've met him in person, once, at a CCC event about a decade ago, and as someone clueless about cryptography all I can say to that is that he certainly had (has?) a my-way-or-the-highway personality.
> I, too, don't support the IETF
Out of curiosity, how would you maintain e.g. TLS? Something more academic? Raw "throw it all out there, best-wins"? Another SDO (e.g. ITU)? Other more formal international processes?
For the record, he's always been extremely nice to me, online and in person, and generous with his time.
I would maintain TLS the same way WireGuard and OpenSSH are maintained. Both have superior track records. I'm generally an opponent of all security and (especially) cryptographic standards bodies.
The gist of it is that standards organizations like the IETF depend on a specific carve-out in US antitrust law (in order for it to be legal for American companies like Cisco and Google to participate in them), and that carve-out includes a specific definition of what "standards organizations" and "consensus" are. So even if the IETF uses different words to describe its processes, those processes still have to comply with the legal definition that separates a "standards organization" from, like, an illegal cartel.
* the IETF's approach predates 15 U.S.C. §4302 by more than a decade
* every single case example cited is US-American scoped¹ SDOs: American Society of Mechanical Engineers, National Fire Protection Association, American
National Standards Institute²
¹ NB scope ≠ legal domicile. The IETF's legal status is… complicated… but does have US dependencies. Its scope is world-wide though. Not so for any of the mentioned entities, even if…
² …ANSI is a borderline case since it is the constituent ISO member. But still, it's the US entity.
I'm not trying to make a legal argument here, but… I'll say he shouldn't be trying to do that either. Most mathematicians and CS majors make very poor lawyers in any case, and often enough without any awareness of it.
There is a small and noisy contingent here that never fails to get bent about community driven projects accusing them of bias and insinuating that there is some kind of shadowy cabal running things and it would be hilarious if the reasons for it weren’t so transparent. Also those people are 100 percent MAGA
MLKEM wasn't designed by NSA, but rather by a team of highly-regarded European academic cryptographers, including Bernstein's former collaborator Peter Schwabe
As you know, teams are vulnerable to infiltration and individuals to compromise. Corruption often stems from various motives, including ideology
that's really not possible for ML-KEM. They took a well-known "boring" design, and tweaked certain internal sub-components of it. Their tweaks were good, and their analysis/exposition of it were good. So they deserve to win. But there were many essentially identical schemes (e.g. Saber and New Hope are essentially the same as ML-KEM).
To infiltrate/compromise ML-KEM, then NSA would need to do something like
1. corrupt some europeans for the literal submission, and
2. corrupt the competing submissions, which are substantially similar, and
3. corrupt the entirety of the cryptographic community so they miss a flaw in the (extremely simple tbh) 2011 paper htat kicked off hte design.
If a conspiracy requires corrupting a single person it's plausible. ML-KEM being intentionally weakend by the NSA would quite literally require corrupting like 100+ different people in different countries. it makes no sense.
if i were the nsa, I'd have spent all my research money on attacking ecc+pq, because 1. no self respecting security engineer would deploy bare pq (see cloudflare), 2. no phd research team would attack the combination (well, not before until it's too late) because that's harder than a phd requires (they will target solo pq or solo ecc). 3. it's much easier to "sell". q.e.d. this article.
Probably not. It's been ~13 years when Snowden said what the NSA is doing is going around the encryption by hacking endpoints. Post quantum cryptography doesn't change any of that. You can still lift TLS keys with exploits for transparent MITM. I'd imagine it's much better ROI to look for vulnerabilities with Mythos, than to attack the algorithms.
> is going around the encryption by hacking endpoints
Because they weren't (supposedly) able to break the encryption
> than to attack the algorithms
You have an opportunity to introduce new, broken, algorithms; they exploited it with DES, tried to exploit it with ECC, why wouldn't they try it with post-quantum (which they've kind of been pushing)?
This is completely backwards. The more cryptography-literate you are, the more likely it is you think hybrids are silly. Plenty of cryptographers think this is all bullshit, and that ECC+MLKEM makes about as much sense as an AES+Serpent cascade. It is simultaneously the case that MLKEM is far less mysterious than programmers on message boards think it is, and that conventional ECC and finite field cryptography is much more mysterious and spooky than they think it is.
(I'm only somewhat cryptography-literate and so I would myself default to a hybrid, though that opinion might change the first time I bother banging together an MLKEM implementation.)
> The more cryptography-literate you are, the more likely it is you think hybrids are silly
You are if you're considering a cypher that's extremely likely to be secure.
In this case we're ok to introduce something with a chance to be quantum-resistant before it's been studied enough, because we want a chance of being quantum-resistant soon.
But that's only ok if you add it to the existing, reliable, systems.
Were there not the issue of quantum computers we wouldn't even be considering to use different cyphers at this time.
Exercise for the reader (out of genuine interest): find the most important cryptographic paper published in the last 15 years that uses the British spelling.
the NSA also recommends elliptic curve cryptography, and designed SHA2 themselves. if you want we can talk through how to disable all of these ciphersuites, so you can be stuck with a bunch of shitty stuff from the 90s and feel warm and fuzzy about it.
Disappointed that there is not more discussion about this as this looks to be a slow march to the government getting its way with a technology that will affect so many.
(1) MLKEM wasn't designed by NSA, but rather by a team of highly-regarded European academic cryptographers, including Bernstein's former collaborator Peter Schwabe; their submission, Kyber, was selected in an open competition in which Bernstein himself submitted a closely-related algorithm (and then contested the result, suing NIST for documents to clarify the selection.)
(2) The RFC at issue documents the possibility of running TLS with pure MLKEM rather than in a hybrid configuration with ECDH. Hybrid TLS is already the mainstream, documented, standardized method for using PQC in a TLS connection. Bernstein is canvassing opposition to any documentation of the possibility of pure MLKEM in TLS.
Every time Bernstein talks about NSA's sordid history, remember: nothing that's happening here has really anything to do with NSA. It would make more sense for Bernstein to be canvassing against SHA2, which NSA actually did design. But he can't do that, because normal people know enough about cryptography to understand how crazy a claim that is. Unfortunately, we can't yet say that about lattice cryptography, despite it being approximately as well-studied as ECC.