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NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit against the US government

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Re: NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit against the US government

#21

Post by throwaway654329 »

yieldcrv wrote: post #5
crabbygrabby wrote: post #2

Seems like a baaad idea lol.

seems like they just need a judge to force the NSA to comply with a Freedom of Information Act request, its just part of the process I'm stonewalled on an equivalent Public Record Act request w/ a state, and am kind of annoyed that I have to use the state's court system Doesn't feel super partial and a couple law journals have written about how its not partial at all in this state and should be improved by the legisl…

This is part of a class division where we cannot practically exercise our rights which are clearly enumerated in public law. Only people with money or connections can even attempt to get many kinds of records.

It’s wrong and government employees involved should be fired, and perhaps seriously punished. If people at NIST had faced real public scrutiny and sanction for their last round of sabotage, perhaps we wouldn’t see delay and dismissal by NIST.

Delay of responding to these requests is yet another kind of sabotage of the public NIST standardization processes. Delay in standardization is delay in deployment. Delay means mass surveillance adversaries have more ciphertext that they can attack with a quantum computer. This isn’t a coincidence, though I am sure the coincidence theorists will come out in full force.

NIST should be responsive in a timely manner and they should be trustworthy, we rely on their standards for all kinds of mandatory data processing. It’s pathetic that Americans don’t have several IG investigations in parallel covering NIST and NSA behavior. Rather we have to rely on a professor to file lawsuits for the public (and cryptographers involved in the standardization process) to have even a glimpse of what is happening. Unbelievable but good that someone is doing it. He deserves our support.

Re: NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit against the US government

#22

Post by nimbius »

throwaway654329 wrote: post #4

The history in this blog post is excellently researched on the topic of NSA and NIST cryptographic sabotage. It presents some hard won truths that many are uncomfortable to discuss, let alone to actively resist. The author of the blog post is also well known for designing and releasing many cryptographic systems as free software. There is a good chance that your TLS connections are secured by some of these designs. O…

the author was also part of the Linux kernel SPECK cipher talks that broke down in 2013 due to the nsa's stonewalling and hand waving for technical data and explanations.

nsa speck was never adopted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speck_(cipher)

Re: NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit against the US government

#23

Post by Banana699 »

lawrenceyan wrote: post #8

Here's an interesting question. Even if post-quantum cryptography is securely implemented, doesn't the advent of neurotechnology (BCIs, etc.) make that method of security obsolete? With read and write capability to the brain, assuming this comes to fruition at some point, encryption as we know it won't work anymore. But I don't know, maybe this isn't something we have to worry about just quite yet.

The thing you're missing is that BCIs and friends are, themselves, computers, and thus securable with post-quantum cryptography, or any cryptography for that matter, or any means of securing a computer. And thus, for somebody to read-write to your computers, they need to read-write to your brain(s), but to read-write to your brain(s), they need to read-write to the computers implanted in your brain(s). It's a security cycle whose overall power is determined by the least-secure element in the chain.

Any sane person will also not touch BCIs and similar technology with a 100 lightyear pole unless the designing company reveals every single fucking silicon atom in the hardware design and every single fucking bit in the software stack at every level of abstraction, and ships the device with several redundant watchdogs and deadmen timers around it that can safely kill or faraday-cage the implant on user-defined events or manually.

Alas, humans are very rarely sane, and I come to the era of bio hacking (in all senses of the word) with low expectations.

Re: NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit against the US government

#25

Post by matthewdgreen »

zitterbewegung wrote: post #3
crabbygrabby wrote: post #2

Seems like a baaad idea lol.

He won a case against the government representing himself so I think he would be on good footing. He is a professor where I graduated and even the faculty told me he was interesting to deal with. Post QC is his main focus right now and also he published curve25519.

He was represented by the EFF during the first, successful case. They declined to represent him in the second case, which ended in a stalemate.

Re: NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit against the US government

#26

Post by lawrenceyan »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #12
lawrenceyan wrote: post #8

Here's an interesting question. Even if post-quantum cryptography is securely implemented, doesn't the advent of neurotechnology (BCIs, etc.) make that method of security obsolete? With read and write capability to the brain, assuming this comes to fruition at some point, encryption as we know it won't work anymore. But I don't know, maybe this isn't something we have to worry about just quite yet.

The encryption is fine, that's just a way to avoid it. Much like how tire-iron attacks don't break passwords so much as bypass them.

Ok that's actually a great point. To make the comparison:

Tire-irons require physical proximity. And torture generally doesn't work, at least in the case of getting a private key.

Reading/writing to the brain, on the other hand, requires no physical proximity if wireless. And the person(s) won't even know it's happening.

These seem like totally different paradigms to me.

Re: NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit against the US government

#27

Post by politelemon »

So, question then, isn't one of the differences between this time's selection, compared to previous selections, that some of the algorithms are open source with their code available.

For example, Kyber, one of the finalists, is here: https://github.com/pq-crystals/kyber

And where it's not open source, I believe in the first round submissions, everyone included reference implementations.

Does the code being available make it easy to verify whether there are some shady/shenanigans going on, even without NIST's cooperation?

Re: NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit against the US government

#28

Post by throwaway654329 »

mort96 wrote: post #16

Weirdly, any time I've suggested that maaaybe being too trusting of a known bad actor which has repeatedly published intentionally weak cryptography is a bad idea, I've received a whole lot of push-back and downvotes here on this site.

Indeed. Have my upvote stranger.

The related “just ignore NIST” crowd is intentionally or unintentionally dismissing serious issues of governance. Anyone who deploys this argument is questionable in my mind, essentially bad faith actors, especially when the topic is about the problems brought to the table by NIST and NSA.

It is a good sign that those people are actively ignoring the areas where you have no choice and you must have your data processed by a party required to deploy FIPS certified software or hardware.

Re: NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit against the US government

#29

Post by ziddoap »

lawrenceyan wrote: post #26
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The encryption is fine, that's just a way to avoid it. Much like how tire-iron attacks don't break passwords so much as bypass them.

Ok that's actually a great point. To make the comparison: Tire-irons require physical proximity. And torture generally doesn't work, at least in the case of getting a private key. Reading/writing to the brain, on the other hand, requires no physical proximity if wireless. And the person(s) won't even know it's happening. These seem like totally different paradigms to me.

I think we are a long way away from being able to wirelessly read a few specific bytes of data from the brain of an unknowing person. Far enough away that I'm not sure it's productive to begin thinking of how to design encryption systems around it.

Re: NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit against the US government

#30

Post by gonehome »

throwaway654329 wrote: post #4

The history in this blog post is excellently researched on the topic of NSA and NIST cryptographic sabotage. It presents some hard won truths that many are uncomfortable to discuss, let alone to actively resist. The author of the blog post is also well known for designing and releasing many cryptographic systems as free software. There is a good chance that your TLS connections are secured by some of these designs. O…

I remember reading about this in Steven Levy's crypto and elsewhere, there was a lot of internal arguing about lots of this stuff at the time and people had different opinions. I remember that some of the suggested changes from NSA shared with IBM were actually stronger against a cryptanalysis attack on DES that was not yet publicly known (though at the the time people suspected they were suggesting this because it was weaker, the attack only became publicly known later). I tried to find the specific info about this, but can't remember the details well enough. Edit: I think it was this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_cryptanalysis

They also did intentionally weaken a standard separately from that and all the arguing about 'munitions export' intentionally requiring weak keys etc. - all the 90s cryptowar stuff that mostly ended after the clipper chip failure. They also worked with IBM on DES, but some people internally at NSA were upset that they shared this after the fact. The history is a lot more mixed with a lot of people arguing about what the right thing to do is and no general consensus on a lot of this stuff.

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