logoalt Hacker News

cryptonectortoday at 12:00 AM1 replyview on HN

> I hate that his more tinfoil hat stuff (which is not totally unjustified, mind you) overshadows his sober technical contributions in these discussions.

Currently he argues that NSA is likely to be attacking the standards process to do some unspecified nefarious thing in PQ algorithms, and he's appealing to our memories of Dual_EC. That's not tinfoil hat stuff! It's a serious possibility that has happened before (Dual_EC). True, no one knows for a fact that NSA backdoored Dual_EC, but it's very very likely that they did -- why bother with such a slow DRBG if not for this benefit of being able to recover session keys?


Replies

tptacektoday at 12:05 AM

NSA wrote Dual EC. A team of (mostly European) academic cryptographers wrote the CRYSTALS constructions. Moreover, the NOBUS mechanism in Dual EC is obvious, and it's not at all clear where you'd do anything like that in Kyber, which goes out of its way not to have the "weird constants" problem that the P-curves (which practitioners generally trust) ended up with.

show 1 reply