61–70 of 219 posts
An important detail you really want to understand before reading this is that NIST (and NSA) didn't come up with these algorithms; they refereed a competition, in which most of the analysis was done by competitors and other academics. The Kyber team was Roberto Avanzi, Joppe Bos, Léo Ducas, Eike Kiltz, Tancrède Lepoint, Vadim Lyubashevsky, John M. Schanck, Gregor Seiler, Damien Stehlé, and also Peter Schwabe, a colla…
An important detail you really want to understand before reading this is that NIST (and NSA) didn't come up with these algorithms; they refereed a competition, in which most of the analysis was done by competitors and other academics. The Kyber team was Roberto Avanzi, Joppe Bos, Léo Ducas, Eike Kiltz, Tancrède Lepoint, Vadim Lyubashevsky, John M. Schanck, Gregor Seiler, Damien Stehlé, and also Peter Schwabe, a colla…
Correct me if I'm wrong, everything is also being done out in the open for everyone to see. The NIST aren't using some secret analysis to make any recommendations.
I've seen enough blatant disregard for humanity to assume any kind of honesty in the powers that were.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why would they be willing to risk that here? Certain types of attacks basically make it so you need to have a specific private key to act as a backdoor. That's the current guess on what may be happening with the NIST ECC curves. If so, this can be effectively a US-only backdoor for a long, long time.
I don't believe that is anybody's guess on what may be happening with the NIST ECC curves. Ordinarily, when people on HN say things like this, they're confusing Dual EC, a public key random number generator, known to be backdoored, with the NIST curve standards.
On the other hand, there is a lot of reasons to use elliptic curve that was intentionally designed, so, DJB's designs. And well, in 2009 I would not imagine that the kinds of stuff that DJB publishes will end up being TLS1.3.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't believe that is anybody's guess on what may be happening with the NIST ECC curves. Ordinarily, when people on HN say things like this, they're confusing Dual EC, a public key random number generator, known to be backdoored, with the NIST curve standards.
The issue with the NIST curves is that they were generated from a PRNG with some kind of completely random seed. The conspiracy theory there is that the seed was selected such as to make the curve exploitable for NSA and NSA only. Choosing such a seed is somewhat harder than complete break of the hash function (IIRC SHA-2) used in the PRNG that was used to derive the curve. On the other hand, there is a lot of reason…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's true that nothing is 100% safe. And to some degree, that makes the argument problematic; regardless of what happened, one could construct a way for US government to mess with things. If you had competition of the world's leading academic cryptographers with a winner selected by popular vote among peers, how do you know that the US hasn't just influenced enough cryptographers to push a subtly broken algorithm? Bu…
That's an argument that would prove too much. If you believe NSA can corrupt academic cryptographers, then you might as well give up on all of cryptography; whatever construction you settle on as trustworthy, they could have sabotaged through the authors. Who's to say they didn't do that to Bernstein directly? If I'd been suborned by NSA, I'd be writing posts like this too!
For what it's worth, I do think the US government could corrupt academic cryptographers. If I was an academic cryptographer, and someone from the US government told me to do something immoral or else they would, say, kill my family, and they gave me reason to believe the threat was genuine, I'm not so sure I wouldn't have done what they told me. And I know this sounds like spy movie shit, but this is the US government.
One last thing though, if you're giving me the black and white choice between blindly trusting the outcome of a US government cryptography standard competition or distrusting the field of cryptography altogether, I choose the latter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue with the NIST curves is that they were generated from a PRNG with some kind of completely random seed. The conspiracy theory there is that the seed was selected such as to make the curve exploitable for NSA and NSA only. Choosing such a seed is somewhat harder than complete break of the hash function (IIRC SHA-2) used in the PRNG that was used to derive the curve. On the other hand, there is a lot of reason…
It's very unlikely the seeds were random, and they weren't even ostensibly generated from a PRNG, as I understand it. Rather, they were passed through SHA1 (remember: this is the 1990s), as a means to destroy any possible structure in the original seed. The actual seeds themselves aren't my story to tell, but are a story that other people are talking about. For my part, I'll just point again to Koblitz and Menenzes o…
Adding accusatory hyperbolic statements like: "You exposed three years of user data to attackers by telling people to use Kyber starting when your patent license activates in 2024, rather than telling people to use NTRU starting in 2021!" doesn't help. Besides the fact that nobody is deploying standalone PQ for some time, there were several alternatives that NIST could have suggested in 2021. How about SIKE? That one was pretty nice until it was broken last year.
Unfortunately, NIST doesn't have a sterling reputation in this area, but if we're going to cast shade on the algorithm and process, a succinct breakdown of why, along with a smoking gun or two would be great. Pages and pages of email analysis, comparison to (only) one other submission, and accusations that everyone is just stalling so data can be vacuumed up because it is completely unprotected makes it harder to take seriously. If Kyber-512 is actually this risky, then it deserves to be communicated clearly.
That's more of a diary than an article -- jargony, disorganized, running in circles, very hard to follow. But the information might be important regardless. There's a strong implication that NIST with help of the NSA intentionally standardized on a weak algorithm. We all know that's possible. But can someone who follows some of this stuff more closely explain what the play would be? I always assumed that weakening pu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an argument that would prove too much. If you believe NSA can corrupt academic cryptographers, then you might as well give up on all of cryptography; whatever construction you settle on as trustworthy, they could have sabotaged through the authors. Who's to say they didn't do that to Bernstein directly? If I'd been suborned by NSA, I'd be writing posts like this too!
You're still not recognizing the difference between corrupting a single academic cryptographer and corrupting a whole bunch of academic cryptographers. This isn't so black and white. For what it's worth, I do think the US government could corrupt academic cryptographers. If I was an academic cryptographer, and someone from the US government told me to do something immoral or else they would, say, kill my family, and…
If you have never heard of Bernstein, this may look like mad ramblings of a proto-Unabomber railing against THE MAN trying to oppress us. However, this man is one of the foremost cryptographers in the world, he has basically single-handedly killed US government crypto export restrictions back in the days, and (not least of all because of Snowden) we know that the NSA really is trying to sabotage cryptography. Also, h…
In this particular case it's worth noting that neither BSI (Germany) nor NLNCSA (The Netherlands) recommend Kyber.
Unfortunately, alternative algorithms are more difficult to work with due to their large key sizes among other factors, but it's a price worth paying. At Backbone we've opted not to go down the easy route.