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by philodeon 21 days ago
But the NSA didn’t throw their weight around in the NIST or IETF processes trying to standardize McEliece, isogenies, HQC, or UOV. They threw their weight around trying to standardize ML-KEM.

And anticipating your “but SIKE turned out to be easily breakable, why didn’t they try to standardize it?” The answer is “it made it shockingly far, but more importantly, SIKE was broken in the unclassified literature, but ML-KEM is broken in the classified literature.” Secrets in unclassified literature are not NOBUS secrets.
1 comments
tptacek 21 days ago
Unfalsifiable just-so argument. The point is that no matter what NIST selected, you could make this argument. Heads, you win, tails, they lose. There's no actual cryptography involved here.
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philodeon 21 days ago
You do realize that the NSA spends many millions on employing mathematicians, right? And that they wouldn’t keep doing that if all the mathematicians did was get really shit-hot at Kerbal Space Program?

An analysis of the comparative risks of these crypto systems should include “The NSA knows a lot of math they’re not sharing, and if they really really like ML-KEM, that’s concerning even if Ptacek keeps pointing out NSA didn’t write it”

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tptacek 21 days ago
When you make an argument that is actually somehow rooted in cryptographic research, I'll have something to reply to. This is all just Schneier-Facts(tm) logic.
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philodeon 21 days ago
To be clear, the Schneier Facts on Dual-EC turned out to be far more accurate than the Ptacek Gut Logic.
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tptacek 21 days ago
Schneier said the same thing I did. I literally got my take from Schneier. You don't even have the Schneier Facts right!
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philodeon 21 days ago
To quote you: “ (I'm among an elite cadre† of cryptography-adjacents who felt it probably wasn't, but only because I thought it was too stupid to actually be used anywhere --- as soon as it was disclosed that (a) it was a default-yes algorithm in BSAFE and (b) big companies actually used BSAFE in important products, it was immediately clear what was going on).”

The BSAFE disclosure happened in 2013 with Snowden. In 2015 you published an article still questioning whether Dual-EC was a backdoor, and providing an immense amount of plausible deniability for folks like Hoffman.

https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/08/04/is-extended-random-ma...

You don’t even remember the historical Ptacek Gut Logic!

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