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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

#61

Post by lawrenceyan »

ziddoap wrote: post #29
lawrenceyan wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Memory and experience aren't encoded in the brain like traditional computers. There's no concept of a "byte" when thinking about the human computational model.

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

#62

Post by throwaway654329 »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #55
throwaway654329 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The full story is interesting and well documented: https://cr.yp.to/export.html Personally my favorite part of the history is on the “Dishonest behavior by government lawyers” page: https://cr.yp.to/export/dishonesty.html - the disclaimer at the top is hilarious: “This is, sad to say, not a complete list.” Indeed! Are you implying that he didn’t contribute to the first win before or during EFF involvement? Are you fu…

I’m saying that the EFF are skilled lawyers who won a major case, and they should not be deprived of credit for that accomplishment.

Sure, EFF played a major role in that case as did Bernstein. It made several lawyers into superstars in legal circles and they all clearly acknowledge his contributions to the case.

Still you imply that he shouldn’t have credit for that first win and that somehow he failed in the second case.

EFF shouldn’t have stopped fighting for the users when the government changed the rules to something that was also unacceptable.

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

#64

Post by cosmiccatnap »

bumper_crop wrote: post #24

This definitely has the sting of bitterness in it, I doubt djb would have filed this suit if NTRU Prime would have won the PQC NIST contest. It's hard to evaluate this objectively when there are strong emotions involved.

It's funny how often the bitterness of a post is used as an excuse to dismiss the long and well documented case being made.

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

#65

Post by matthewdgreen »

throwaway654329 wrote: post #62
matthewdgreen wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m saying that the EFF are skilled lawyers who won a major case, and they should not be deprived of credit for that accomplishment.

Sure, EFF played a major role in that case as did Bernstein. It made several lawyers into superstars in legal circles and they all clearly acknowledge his contributions to the case. Still you imply that he shouldn’t have credit for that first win and that somehow he failed in the second case. EFF shouldn’t have stopped fighting for the users when the government changed the rules to something that was also unacceptabl…

The original poster said “he won a case against the government representing himself” and I felt that statement was incomplete, if not inaccurate and wanted to correct the record. I’m pretty sure Dan, if he was here, would do the same.

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

#66

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #20
aliqot wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given his track record, and the actual meat of this suit, I think he has a good chance. - He is an expert in the domain - He made a lawful request - He believes he's experiencing an obstruction of his rights I don't see anything egregious here. Being critical of your government is a protected right for USA. Everyone gets a moment to state their case if they'd like to make an accusation. Suing sounds offensive, but th…

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

The dragnets existed before 9/11. That just gave justification for even more funding.

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

#67

Post by greyface- »

gnabgib wrote: post #60
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…

Worth noting DJB (the article author) was on two competing (losing) teams to Kyber[0] in Round 3. And has an open submission in round 4 (still in progress). That's going to slightly complicate any FOIA until after the fact, or it should. Not that there's no merit in the request. [0]: https://csrc.nist.gov/Projects/post-quantum-cryptography/pos...

> the Supreme Court has observed that a FOIA requester's identity generally "has no bearing on the merits of his or her FOIA request."

https://www.justice.gov/archives/oip/foia-guide-2004-edition...

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

#68

Post by throwaway654329 »

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…

You are not accurately reflecting the history that is presented in the very blog post we are discussing.

NSA made DES weaker for everyone by reducing the key size. IBM happily went along. The history of IBM is dark. NSA credited tweaks to DES can be understood as ensuring that a weakened DES stayed deployed longer which was to their advantage. They clearly explain this in the history quoted by the author:

“Narrowing the encryption problem to a single, influential algorithm might drive out competitors, and that would reduce the field that NSA had to be concerned about. Could a public encryption standard be made secure enough to protect against everything but a massive brute force attack, but weak enough to still permit an attack of some nature using very sophisticated (and expensive) techniques?”

They’re not internally conflicted. They’re strategic saboteurs.

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

#70

Post by icodestuff »

glitchc wrote: post #40
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.

Many government or government affiliated organizations are required to comply with NIST approved algorithms by regulation or for interoperability. If NIST cannot be trusted as a reputable source it leaves those organizations in limbo. They are not equipped to roll their own crypto and even if they did, it would be a disaster.

"Other people have no choice but to trust NIST" is not a good argument for trusting NIST. Somehow I don't imagine the NSA is concerned about -- and is probably actively in favor of -- those organizations having backdoors.
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