alt Hacker NewsLook at the timeline for performant non-leaking implementations of Weierstrass curves. How long are you going to wait for these things to settle? I feel like there's also a hindsight bias that slips into a lot of this stuff.
Certainly, if you're going to do standards adoption by open competition the way NIST has done with AES, SHA3, and MLKEM, you're not going to be able to factor multiple major implementations into your process.
This isn’t black and white. There’s a medium between:
* Wait for 10 years of cryptanalysis (specific to the final algorithm) before using anything, which probably will be relatively meager because nobody is using it
* Expect the standardization process itself to produce a blessed artifact, to be set on fire as a false god if it turns out to be imperfect (or more realistically, just cause everybody a bunch of pain for 20 years)
Nothing would stop NIST from adding a post-competition phase where Google, Microsoft, Amazon, whoever the hell is maintaining OpenSSL, and maybe Mozilla implement the algorithm in their respective libraries and kick the tires. Maybe it’s pointless and everything we’d expect to get from cryptographers observing that process for a few months to a year has already been suitably covered, and DJB is just being prissy. I don’t know enough about cryptanalysis to know.
But I do feel very confident that many of the IETF standards I’ve been on the receiving end of could have used a non-reference implementation phase to find practical, you-could-technically-do-it-right-but-you-won’t issues that showed up within the first 6 months of people trying to use the damn thing.