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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

#41

Post by jcranmer »

xenophonf wrote: post #6

Good god, this guy is a bad communicator. Bottom line up front: > NIST has produced zero records in response to this [March 2022] FOIA request [to determine whether/how NSA may have influenced NIST's Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization Project]. Civil-rights firm Loevy & Loevy has now filed suit on my behalf in federal court, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, to force NIST to comply…

That is truly burying the lede...

I spent most of the post asking myself "okay, I'm guessing this is something about post-quantum crypto, but what are you actually suing about?"

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

#42

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

throwaway654329 wrote: post #21
yieldcrv wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Even though I broadly agree with what you've written here ... the situation in question isn't really about NIST/NSA response to FOIA requests at all.

It's about whether the US government has deliberately acted to foist weak encryption on the public (US and otherwise), presumably out of desire/belief that it has the right/need to always decrypt.

Whether and how those agencies respond to FOIA requests is a bit of a side-show, or maybe we could call it a prequel.

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

#43

Post by jcranmer »

If anyone is curious, the courtlistener link for the lawsuit is here: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/64872195/bernstein-v-na...

(And somebody has already kindly uploaded the documents to RECAP, so it costs you nothing to access.)

Aside: I really wish people would link to court documents whenever they talk about an ongoing lawsuit.

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

#44

Post by api »

tptacek wrote: post #32

I may believe almost all of this is overblown and silly, as like a matter of cryptographic research, but I'll say that Matt Topic and Merrick Wayne are the real deal, legit the lawyers you want working on something like this, and if they're involved, presumably some good will come out of the whole thing. Matt Topic is probably best known as the FOIA attorney who got the Laquan McDonald videos released in Chicago; I'v…

I don't think it's a bad thing to push back and demand transparency. At the very least the pressure helps keep NIST honest. Keep reminding them over and over and over again about dual-EC and they're less likely to try stupid stuff like that again.

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

#47

Post by gene91 »

feet wrote: post #34
maerF0x0 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd add * and it's been 20 yrs since the 9/11 attacks which predicated a lot of the more recent dragnets

I'll also add Which have not prevented anything and instead are used in parallel construction to go after Americans

I don’t like the collateral damages of many policies. But it’s not fair to say that the policies “have not prevented anything” because we simply don’t know. The policies could have stopped in-progress evil acts (but they were never revealed to the public for intel reasons) or prevented attempts of an evil acts (well, nothing happened, nothing to report).

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

#48

Post by api »

gonehome wrote: post #30
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 w…

> 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

So we have that and other examples of NSA apparently strengthening crypto, then we have the dual-EC debacle and some of the info in the Snowden leaks showing that they've tried to weaken it.

I feel like any talk about NSA influence on NIST PQ or other current algorithm development is just speculation unless someone can turn up actual evidence one way or another. I can think of reasons the NSA would try to strengthen it and reasons they might try to weaken it, and they've done both in the past. You can drive yourself nuts constructing infinitely recursive what-if theories.

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

#49

Post by feet »

gene91 wrote: post #47
feet wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll also add Which have not prevented anything and instead are used in parallel construction to go after Americans

I don’t like the collateral damages of many policies. But it’s not fair to say that the policies “have not prevented anything” because we simply don’t know. The policies could have stopped in-progress evil acts (but they were never revealed to the public for intel reasons) or prevented attempts of an evil acts (well, nothing happened, nothing to report).

I find it rather funny that we know about the parallel construction which they attempt to keep hidden, yet don't know about any successful preventions. I would assume they would at least want people to know if a program was a success. To me, the lack of information speaks volumes

This is on top of all the entrapment that we also know about, performed by the FBI and associated informants on Islamic/Muslim communities

The purpose of a system is what it does

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

#50

Post by aaaaaaaaaaab »

politelemon wrote: post #27

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…

What? :D

Who cares about a particular piece of source code? Cryptanalysis is about the mathematical structure of the ciphers. When we say the NSA backdoored an algorithm, we don't mean that they included hidden printf statements in "the source code". It means that mathematicians at the NSA have knowledge of weaknesses in the construction, that are not known publicly.

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