241–250 of 494 posts
I just want to say, the problem here is worldwide standards bodies for encryption need to be trustworthy. It is incredibly hard to know what encryption is actually real without a deep mathematics background and even then, a choir of peers must be able to present algorithms, and audits of those algorithms with a straight face. Presenting broken-by-design encryption undermines public confidence in what should be one of…
Why is the submission URL using http instead of https? That just seems... bizarre.
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Believing both "Don't roll your own crypto" and "Don't trust the standards" would seem to leave the average developer in something of a quandry, no?
No. I don't think we should rely on formal standards, like FIPS, NIST, and the IETF. Like Bernstein himself, I do think we should rely on peer-reviewed expert cryptography. I use Chapoly, not a stream cipher I concocted myself, or some bizarro cipher cascade posted to HN. This is what I'm talking about when I mentioned the Noise Protocol Framework. If IETF standards happen to end up with good cryptography because the…
Lack of standardization might just make it harder for Joe to filter through the google searches and figure out what algorithm to use. He may just pick the first result on Google, which is an ad for the highest bidder on some keywords which may or may not be good.
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One says he’s doing it wrong. The other says he hopes that he wins, of course! Meanwhile they go on to attack Bernstein, mischaracterize his writing, completely dismiss his historical analysis, mock him with memes as a conspiracy theorist, and to top it off they question his internal motivations (which they somehow know) as some kind of a sore loser which is demonstrably false. The plot twist for the last point: he i…
Two things can easily be true: that NIST mishandled a FOIA request, and that there isn't especially good reason to accept on faith Bernstein's concerns about the PQC process, which is unrelated to how they handle FOIA. Meanwhile: you haven't actually added any light to this subthread: the tweets we're talking about do not dismiss the suit. Cryptographic researchers that aren't stans of Daniel Bernstein (there are a l…
The issues raised in the blog post aren’t just about NIST mishandling the FOIA. By reducing it to the lawsuit, this is already a bad faith engagement.
The blog post is primarily about the history of NSA sabotage as well as contemporary efforts, including (NIST’s) failures to stop this sabotage. Finally it finishes the recent history by raising that there are mishandling issues in the pq-crypto competition. The lawsuit is at the end of a long chronological text with the goal of finding more information to extend the facts that we know. This is a noble goal, and it’s hard to accept any argument that the past in this area hasn’t been troubled.
Weirdly there is an assumption made immediately by Filippo, made without basis in fact: he supposes Bernstein somehow lost the contest and that this is his motivation for action. Bernstein hasn’t lost, though some structured lattices have won. He still has submitted material in the running as far as I understand things. None the less we see that Filippo tells us the deepest internal motivations of Bernstein, though we don’t learn how he learned these personal secrets. This is simply not reasonable. Maybe it could be phrased as a question but then the rhetorical tool of denying questions as a valid form of engagement would start to fade away.
Back to the core of the tweets: One of the two says he hopes he wins the suit, the other says he’s doing it wrong. We could read that as they’re both hoping he wins, and yet… it’s hard to believe when the rhetoric centers around Bernstein’s supposedly harmful rhetoric in the blog post and lawsuit as being harmful to the community at large.
Bernstein isn’t attacking a singular person as Filippo is attacking Bernstein. Filippo even includes a meme to drive home the personal nature of the attacks.
For me personally, I used to find this meme funny until I learned the history of the meme. This strikes me as blind spot, my very own once. The context and history of that meme and that scene is dark.
So then, here is some light for you: This meme is a parody from a comedy. In turn it is a parody of a famous scene from a film portraying John Nash. It’s about a very famous mentally ill mathematician. Nash in this scene is the iconic, quintessential conspiracy theorist insane person once considered a genius. Nash is drawing connections that aren’t there and that aren’t reasonable. He was deeply mentally ill at that point in his life. That is a brutal thing to say in itself about anyone, but… it gets worse.
Nash was also famously a virulent antisemitic in some of his psychological breaks and outbursts. I don’t hold him responsible for his ravings as he was a paranoid schizophrenic, but wow I would not throw up that specific meme at a (Jewish) mathematician while implying he’s a crazy conspiracy theorist. It’s some really gross mental health hate mixed with ambiguity about the rest. It could be funny in some contexts, I suppose, but not this one.
So in summary: that is a gross meme to post in a series of ad-hominem tweet attacks calling (obviously Jewish family name) Bernstein a conspiracy theorist, saying he is making obviously crazy, baseless connections. The root of his concern is not insane and ignoring the history of sabotage in this area by NSA is unreasonable.
I assume this meme subtext is a mistake and it wasn’t intended as antisemitic. Still after processing the mental health punching down part of the meme, I had trouble assuming good faith about any of it. Talk about harmful rhetoric in the community.
I also note that they attack him in a number of other bad faith ways which make me lose my assumption of good faith generally about their well wishing on his lawsuit being successfully.
Meanwhile, I don’t take Bernstein on faith. I find his arguments and points in the blog post convincing. I find his history of work in the public interest convincing. I don’t care about popularity contests or personal competition. Meanwhile you say you’re not following the contest.
Corruption of NIST and other related parties isn’t just possible, we know it has happened. We should be extra vigilant that it doesn’t repeat. FOIA is a weak mechanism but it’s something. Has any corruption or sabotage happened here? We don’t know yet, and more important NIST have promised transparency that they haven’t delivered. A promise is a good start but it’s not sufficient.
NIST have slipped their own deadlines, they have been silent in concerning ways, and they’re still failing to provide critical details about the last round of NSA sabotage that directly involved NIST standardization.
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Look, my point is that there are lots of companies around the world who can’t afford highly skilled mathematicians and cryptographers on staff. These institutions rely on NIST to help them determine what encryption systems may make sense. If NIST is truly adversarial, the public has a right to know and determine how to engage going forward.
They don't have to (and shouldn't) retain highly skilled mathematicians. Nobody is suggesting that everyone design their own ciphers, authenticated key exchanges, signature schemes, and secure transports. Peer review is good; vital; an absolute requirement. Committee-based selection processes are what's problematic.
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> I believe the implication that NIST or NSA somehow bribed one of the PQC researchers to weaken a submission is risible. maybe you don't know what risible means, but it reads like you're saying that the NSA "somehow" coercing someone is unlikely, which i'm sure you can agree is a "very naive and trusting view"
No part of what I said had anything to do with what NSA would or wouldn't attempt to do. If you don't understand what I wrote, ask questions. What you did instead was leap to stupid conclusions.
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They had a privately known way to weaken DES that effectively shortens the key length. They could have pretended to allow a longer key length while secretly retaining their privately known attack that lets them shorten it (without also acting to strengthen DES against it). They knew this in the 70s 20 years before it would become publicly known. They actively strengthened DES against this while not revealing the expl…
You’re making a lot of assumptions and guesses to imply they helped overall when we know they weakened DES by reducing the key size such that it was practically breakable as a hobby project. At the time of DES creation, Hellman remarked that this was a bad enough problem to fix it by raising the key size. NSA and IBM and others ignored the cryptographers who were not compromised. Any benefit against DC attacks seems…
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I believe the implication that NIST or NSA somehow bribed one of the PQC researchers to weaken a submission is risible. I believe that NIST is obligated to be responsive to FOIA requests, even if the motivation behind those requests is risible.
I believe you have a very naive and trusting view of these US governmental bodies. I don't intend that to be an insult, but by now I think the jury is out that these agencies cannot be trusted (the NSA less so, than NIST).
Running standards without full transparency, in my experiences of web security standards + web GPU standards is almost always due to hiding weaknesses, incompetence, security gaps of big players, & internal politics of these powerful incumbents. Think some hardware vendor not playing ball without guarantee of privacy, some Google/Apple committee member dragging their feet because of internal politics & monopoly plays. Seperately, mistakes may come from standards committee member glossing over stuff in emails because they're busy: senior folks are the most technically qualified yet also most busy. Generally not because some NSA/CIA employee is telling them to do something sneaky or lying. Still FOIA-worthy (and why I rather public lists for standards), but for much lamer reasons.