alt Hacker NewsAES and RSA had enough public scrutiny to make backdooring backdoors imprudent.
The standardization of an obviously weaker option than more established ones is difficult to explain with security reasons, so the default assumption should be that there are insecurity reasons.
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woodruffw • yesterday at 7:22 PM
> AES and RSA had enough public scrutiny to make backdooring backdoors imprudent.
Can you elaborate on the standard of scrutiny that you believe AES and RSA (which were standardized at two very different maturation points in applied cryptography) met that hasn't been applied to the NIST PQ process?
There was lots of public scrutiny of Kyber (ML-KEM); DJB made his own submission to the NIST PQC standardization process. A purposely introduced backdoor in Kyber makes absolutely no sense; it was submitted by 11 respected cryptographers, and analyzed by hundreds of people over the course of standardization.
I disagree that ML-KEM is "obviously weaker". In some ways, lattice-based cryptography has stronger hardness foundations than RSA and EC (specifically, average -> worst case reductions).
ML-KEM and EC are definitely complementary, and I would probably only deploy hybrids in the near future, but I don't begrudge others who wish to do pure ML-KEM.