Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry, I picked my words carefully in that last comment.
Is this related to his PhD advising of Appelbaum and his declaration in Todd v. Lovecruft?
Nope, but that was super gross too. See cryptography Twitter.
NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit against the US government
481–490 of 494 posts
Re: NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit against the US government
#482Earlier quoted context omitted.
Peer review and "informal standards". Good examples of things that were, until long after their widespread adoption, informal standards include Curve25519, Salsa20 and ChaCha20, and Poly1305. A great example of an informal standard that remains an informal standard despite near-universal adoption is WireGuard. More things like WireGuard. Less things like X.509.
As much as I like the design of WireGuard, the original paper made stronger claims of security than were achieved with respect to key exchange models. Peer review and informal standards failed in catching this. From my perspective, the true benefit of a formal standardisation process such as this is that it dangles such a publishable target in front of researchers that we formally verify/disprove these claims out in…
WireGuard's design is superior to that of its competitors, and one of its distinctive features is that it lacks formal standardization. It's not as if we don't have decades of experiences with attempts to standardize our way into strong cryptography; see IPSEC for a particularly notorious example of how badly standards processes handle this stuff.
Re: NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit against the US government
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
As much as I like the design of WireGuard, the original paper made stronger claims of security than were achieved with respect to key exchange models. Peer review and informal standards failed in catching this. From my perspective, the true benefit of a formal standardisation process such as this is that it dangles such a publishable target in front of researchers that we formally verify/disprove these claims out in…
WireGuard's design is superior to that of its competitors, and one of its distinctive features is that it lacks formal standardization. It's not as if we don't have decades of experiences with attempts to standardize our way into strong cryptography; see IPSEC for a particularly notorious example of how badly standards processes handle this stuff.
For sure, if a standardization process had been called to design a VPN protocol, I'd agree that the resulting design would almost certainly be less than WireGuard. I think that the competitive nature of the PQC process as well as soliciting completed submissions as opposed to a process to build from the ground-up helps in this regard. I don't think that engages with the point I was making, however: the original submission of WireGuard made claims that were incorrect, which would have arguably been caught sooner if it were a part of a formal standardization process, since researchers would have been incentivized to analyse it sooner.
Re: NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit against the US government
#484Earlier quoted context omitted.
WireGuard's design is superior to that of its competitors, and one of its distinctive features is that it lacks formal standardization. It's not as if we don't have decades of experiences with attempts to standardize our way into strong cryptography; see IPSEC for a particularly notorious example of how badly standards processes handle this stuff.
For sure, if a standardization process had been called to design a VPN protocol, I'd agree that the resulting design would almost certainly be less than WireGuard. I think that the competitive nature of the PQC process as well as soliciting completed submissions as opposed to a process to build from the ground-up helps in this regard. I don't think that engages with the point I was making, however: the original submi…
Having come from a community that is often cleanup duty for unfounded claims (PL) and having to spend ~decade+ $100M+ efforts to do so... I didn't realize that about wireguard. That's pretty strange to read in 2022.
Re: NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit against the US government
#485Earlier quoted context omitted.
For sure, if a standardization process had been called to design a VPN protocol, I'd agree that the resulting design would almost certainly be less than WireGuard. I think that the competitive nature of the PQC process as well as soliciting completed submissions as opposed to a process to build from the ground-up helps in this regard. I don't think that engages with the point I was making, however: the original submi…
Having come from a community that is often cleanup duty for unfounded claims (PL) and having to spend ~decade+ $100M+ efforts to do so... I didn't realize that about wireguard. That's pretty strange to read in 2022.
To be clear, WireGuard is a good VPN protocol, and definitely a secure design. I wouldn't recommend another over it. It's just the initial claims of security in the NDSS paper were incompatible with its design.
Re: NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit against the US government
#486Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. Formal, centralized crypto standards, be they NIST or IETF, are a force for evil. 2. All else equal, fewer dependencies on randomness are better. But all else is not equal, and you can easily lose security by adding determinism to designs willy-nilly in an effort to minimize randomness dependencies. Nothing is, any time in the conceivable future, change to make a broken RNG not game-over. So the important thing re…
The problem with formal centralized standards is that they tend to become ceilings rather than floors for quality, and it's hard to write them otherwise. They do however serve a function in keeping total snake oil crypto out of government and industry. Having some rubber stamp from people who at least know something keeps people with no knowledge of cryptography from buying the latest absolutely uncrackable post-quan…
>We see it all the time.
Really? I'd like to hear about that.
And is astroturfing the most likely attack vector? That might work on big social media where it's easy to feel like you've got a finger on the pulse of public opinion by scrolling down a long list of anonymous content, but it presumably wouldn't work in crypto (or crypto adjacent) communities which are much smaller and where individual reputations are quite important.
Re: NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit against the US government
#487Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having come from a community that is often cleanup duty for unfounded claims (PL) and having to spend ~decade+ $100M+ efforts to do so... I didn't realize that about wireguard. That's pretty strange to read in 2022.
To be clear, WireGuard is a good VPN protocol, and definitely a secure design. I wouldn't recommend another over it. It's just the initial claims of security in the NDSS paper were incompatible with its design.
I'm sure it's a pretty good one, but it's quite hard to trust more than that both on the design + impl side if you ever have tried to verify (vs just test) such a system. Think the years of pain for something much more trivial like paxos + an impl of it.
In this case, looks like the community does value backing up its claims, and the protocol is verified: https://www.wireguard.com/formal-verification/ . Pretty awesome! The implementation itself seems to be written unsafely, so TBD there.
Re: NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit against the US government
#488Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with formal centralized standards is that they tend to become ceilings rather than floors for quality, and it's hard to write them otherwise. They do however serve a function in keeping total snake oil crypto out of government and industry. Having some rubber stamp from people who at least know something keeps people with no knowledge of cryptography from buying the latest absolutely uncrackable post-quan…
>We see it all the time. Really? I'd like to hear about that. And is astroturfing the most likely attack vector? That might work on big social media where it's easy to feel like you've got a finger on the pulse of public opinion by scrolling down a long list of anonymous content, but it presumably wouldn't work in crypto (or crypto adjacent) communities which are much smaller and where individual reputations are quit…
It's endless in areas like nutritional science, public policy, energy policy, environmental issues, etc.
Here's a random five second search result:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aat3763
These are examples of academic communities being influenced by corporate or state interests.
It's much easier with informal online communities subject to herd effects.
Re: NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit against the US government
#489Earlier quoted context omitted.
The carve-out you mention is a decent idea on paper, but in practice is a difficult process. There's really no way to do it in any significant degree without basically putting all gov to a complete halt. Consider that government is not staffed with technical people, nor necessarily critically minded people to implement these systems. There are ways to push for FOIA improvements that don't require this sort of drastic…
A private right of action and waiver of immunity solves most of the “bad actor” problems. The big issue is how to preserve what actually needs to be secret (in the interest of the USA, not the interests of the bureaucracy) while forcing everything else to be public. A lot of things are secret that don’t need to be secret; that’s a side effect of mandatory data classification and normal bureaucratic incentives- you wo…
I'm sorry, but very little of what you're saying makes sense in practice. I suggest submitting some FOIA requests to your local government to get some context and understanding of the difficulties.
Re: NSA, NIST, and post-quantum crypto: my second lawsuit against the US government
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can I ask that, if you're going to accuse me of shilling in an HN thread, you at least come up with something that I'm shilling? I don't care what it is; you can say that I'm shilling for Infowars Life ProstaGuard Prostate Health Supplement with Saw Palmetto and Anti-Oxidant, for all I care, just identify something .
It's very disconcerting, for the sake of open and honest discourse, that you or someone else decided to flag (and thus censor) my reply to this request.
It probably got flagged for national security reasons.