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NSA and IETF: Fairness

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131–140 of 198 posts

Re: NSA and IETF: Fairness

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means that your argument is “the NSA couldn’t have subverted ML-KEM, it was written by Europeans”. You assiduously pretend that this scenario isn’t possible: * The NSA reviewed the PQ submissions and realized that there’s one they already know how to break at scale: ML-KEM, because their army of math PhDs spent a couple decades understanding it better than the rest of the world * The NSA decides they want ML-KEM d…

You're just restating the same claim with more words. It obviously proves too much. You can stick any algorithm, from MLKEM to SNTRUP to CRC32, in the same comments and get the same result.

No, because if the NSA didn’t already know how to break one of the cryptosystems, their engagement with the contest would have looked much different. They’d genuinely engage with the contestants and provide accurate security margin estimates. They wouldn’t barge in and make illegal procedural demands.

This is called praxeology. One would think that someone who has already been a useful idiot on behalf of the NSA regarding Dual-EC-DRBG might learn to keep their naivete to themselves.

Re: NSA and IETF: Fairness

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're just restating the same claim with more words. It obviously proves too much. You can stick any algorithm, from MLKEM to SNTRUP to CRC32, in the same comments and get the same result.

No, because if the NSA didn’t already know how to break one of the cryptosystems, their engagement with the contest would have looked much different. They’d genuinely engage with the contestants and provide accurate security margin estimates. They wouldn’t barge in and make illegal procedural demands. This is called praxeology. One would think that someone who has already been a useful idiot on behalf of the NSA rega…

I don't think you understand the argument you're making here. NSA had no hand in MLKEM itself or even in the line of research that led to MLKEM. Whatever advantage you're claiming they have with respect to MLKEM, I could just as straightforwardly claim they had for McEliece, isogenies, HQC, or UOV.

Re: NSA and IETF: Fairness

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, because if the NSA didn’t already know how to break one of the cryptosystems, their engagement with the contest would have looked much different. They’d genuinely engage with the contestants and provide accurate security margin estimates. They wouldn’t barge in and make illegal procedural demands. This is called praxeology. One would think that someone who has already been a useful idiot on behalf of the NSA rega…

I don't think you understand the argument you're making here. NSA had no hand in MLKEM itself or even in the line of research that led to MLKEM. Whatever advantage you're claiming they have with respect to MLKEM, I could just as straightforwardly claim they had for McEliece, isogenies, HQC, or UOV.

But the NSA didn’t throw their weight around in the NIST or IETF processes trying to standardize McEliece, isogenies, HQC, or UOV. They threw their weight around trying to standardize ML-KEM.

And anticipating your “but SIKE turned out to be easily breakable, why didn’t they try to standardize it?” The answer is “it made it shockingly far, but more importantly, SIKE was broken in the unclassified literature, but ML-KEM is broken in the classified literature.” Secrets in unclassified literature are not NOBUS secrets.

Re: NSA and IETF: Fairness

#134
post #5

This post was pretty technical. Let's explain a couple of terms: ML-KEM -- Module-Lattice-Based Key-Encapsulation Mechanism ML-DSA -- Module-Lattice-Based Digital Signature Algorithm solo PQ -- Using post-quantum crypto on its own ECC+PQ -- Using post-quantum crypto as a layer on top of traditional elliptical curve cryptography (ECC) So what's at stake here, is that the PQ crypto is not proven yet, and had recent imp…

1. Kyberslash is mostly marketing. Some implementations (including the Kyber reference implementation, but *not* including the Kyber AVX implementation) had a non-constant time component. This is a meaningful CVE. It is not some fundamental weakness that should cause a panic. Note that the non-constant time implementations were caught ~2 years ago, prior to any deployment. So it was a sign of everything going "as expected", not of some new fundamental issue.

2. combining the cryptosystems, in most settings, is rather low cost. I would personally recommend it as a sensible default. It is not low cost in every setting though, for example in hardware it necessitates both a SHA2 and SHA3 impl, which is fairly expensive. So while hybrids are a sensible default, I would not go as far as to attempt to "ban" use of pure ML-KEM.

3. pure ML-KEM is much more "proven" than people are discussing. The core hardness assumption dates back to 2005, and has been intensely studied (the paper introducing it got a cryptography version of a Nobel prize (Godel prize), as did several follow-up works only achievable using that hardness assumption. The essential components of ML-KEM were proposed in ~2011. An extremely similar scheme (New Hope) was deployed experimentally in a hybrid in Chrome in 2016. Very concretely, the best theoretical attacks on ML-KEM take time ~2^cn for a c that has not changed in the last ~decade. Everything is as boring as you might hope.

On essentially any reasonable measure you could ask for, things have been "stable" with ML-KEM for ~1 decade. In the intervening years, a number of academics/companies have devoted a great deal of money on things built from even more sketchy hardness assumptions (I'm discussing the things underlying Fully Homomorphic Encryption). Even these have been essentially fine (I have some personal quibbles with some assumptions used, though they are technically dense, and are not relevant to ML-KEM in the slightest). So this is to say that there are natural "easier instances" of the thing underlying ML-KEM, and there still haven't been successful attacks of those instances.

Anyway though, the question isn't "should you use pure ML-KEM rather than hybrid". I would personally suggest hybrid unless it is extremely limiting for some particular scenario (and there are scenarios, such as hardware, where it is). The question is "should we standardize how pure ML-KEM TLS works, so implementors can create interoperable implementations?".

The answer to this should (clearly) be yes. ML-KEM is boring, high-quality cryptography. If a quantum computer appeared tomorrow, and only ML-KEM protected me, I would not lose any sleep personally. Efforts to delay standardization rely on "arguments" that do not match reality in the slightest.

Re: NSA and IETF: Fairness

#135

> Secret NSA documents showed that NSA pushed DES in the 1970s to "drive out competitors" while knowing that DES was "weak enough" to break; meanwhile NSA publicly claimed that it would use DES Is this true? The NSA pushed for weaker cryptography it could break versus stronger cryptography our adversaries couldn't?

as mentioned it's complicated, but the general trend of the NSA pushing cryptography they can break and others can't is well-known.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOBUS

note that there is no even candidate way the NSA would have a NOBUS-type vulnerability for ML-KEM. DUAL_EC_DRBG was known to plausibly have a NOBUS-style backdoor prior to standardization, provided you used a certain "default" generator (vs freshly generating your own). It was later discovered that the NSA payed RSA (the company) to do this.

While this payment was private, the possibility of a back door was publicly known. There are no publicly known candidate backdoors for ML-KEM. The broad design of an ML-KEM-like scheme permits one ("static" matrix A), but ML-KEM was specifically designed to make this impossible ("ephemeral" matrix A).

Re: NSA and IETF: Fairness

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you understand the argument you're making here. NSA had no hand in MLKEM itself or even in the line of research that led to MLKEM. Whatever advantage you're claiming they have with respect to MLKEM, I could just as straightforwardly claim they had for McEliece, isogenies, HQC, or UOV.

But the NSA didn’t throw their weight around in the NIST or IETF processes trying to standardize McEliece, isogenies, HQC, or UOV. They threw their weight around trying to standardize ML-KEM. And anticipating your “but SIKE turned out to be easily breakable, why didn’t they try to standardize it?” The answer is “it made it shockingly far, but more importantly, SIKE was broken in the unclassified literature, but ML-KE…

Unfalsifiable just-so argument. The point is that no matter what NIST selected, you could make this argument. Heads, you win, tails, they lose. There's no actual cryptography involved here.

Re: NSA and IETF: Fairness

#137

If a US three letter agency recommends it, I don't want it.

the NSA also recommends elliptic curve cryptography, and designed SHA2 themselves. if you want we can talk through how to disable all of these ciphersuites, so you can be stuck with a bunch of shitty stuff from the 90s and feel warm and fuzzy about it.

Re: NSA and IETF: Fairness

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the NSA didn’t throw their weight around in the NIST or IETF processes trying to standardize McEliece, isogenies, HQC, or UOV. They threw their weight around trying to standardize ML-KEM. And anticipating your “but SIKE turned out to be easily breakable, why didn’t they try to standardize it?” The answer is “it made it shockingly far, but more importantly, SIKE was broken in the unclassified literature, but ML-KE…

Unfalsifiable just-so argument. The point is that no matter what NIST selected, you could make this argument. Heads, you win, tails, they lose. There's no actual cryptography involved here.

You do realize that the NSA spends many millions on employing mathematicians, right? And that they wouldn’t keep doing that if all the mathematicians did was get really shit-hot at Kerbal Space Program?

An analysis of the comparative risks of these crypto systems should include “The NSA knows a lot of math they’re not sharing, and if they really really like ML-KEM, that’s concerning even if Ptacek keeps pointing out NSA didn’t write it”

Re: NSA and IETF: Fairness

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfalsifiable just-so argument. The point is that no matter what NIST selected, you could make this argument. Heads, you win, tails, they lose. There's no actual cryptography involved here.

You do realize that the NSA spends many millions on employing mathematicians, right? And that they wouldn’t keep doing that if all the mathematicians did was get really shit-hot at Kerbal Space Program? An analysis of the comparative risks of these crypto systems should include “The NSA knows a lot of math they’re not sharing, and if they really really like ML-KEM, that’s concerning even if Ptacek keeps pointing out…

When you make an argument that is actually somehow rooted in cryptographic research, I'll have something to reply to. This is all just Schneier-Facts(tm) logic.

Re: NSA and IETF: Fairness

#140
post #85

MLKEM wasn't designed by NSA, but rather by a team of highly-regarded European academic cryptographers, including Bernstein's former collaborator Peter Schwabe As you know, teams are vulnerable to infiltration and individuals to compromise. Corruption often stems from various motives, including ideology

that's really not possible for ML-KEM. They took a well-known "boring" design, and tweaked certain internal sub-components of it. Their tweaks were good, and their analysis/exposition of it were good. So they deserve to win. But there were many essentially identical schemes (e.g. Saber and New Hope are essentially the same as ML-KEM).

To infiltrate/compromise ML-KEM, then NSA would need to do something like

1. corrupt some europeans for the literal submission, and

2. corrupt the competing submissions, which are substantially similar, and

3. corrupt the entirety of the cryptographic community so they miss a flaw in the (extremely simple tbh) 2011 paper htat kicked off hte design.

If a conspiracy requires corrupting a single person it's plausible. ML-KEM being intentionally weakend by the NSA would quite literally require corrupting like 100+ different people in different countries. it makes no sense.

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