alt Hacker NewsIt's a simple question. I'm not asking anybody to prove anything. I'm literally asking: propose the PQC standard IETF could have subverted, and give a sketch of how they could have done it. The bar is merely "plausibility". I'm not asking whether NSA has subverted standards before; obviously they have.
NSA, by the way, rescued DES from differential cryptography, the core mechanism by which block ciphers and hash functions have been attacked ever since.
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Vecr • today at 4:11 AM
> NSA, by the way, rescued DES from differential cryptography, the core mechanism by which block ciphers and hash functions have been attacked ever since
That's why you use ML-KEM 1024 at all... As part of a hybrid.
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They did both - they strengthened it from differential integrity but weakened it by picking a known-to-be-too-short key length. Meaning they had the compute power to crack it but others couldn’t do the same through pure algorithmic means.
As for your post below
> it can't be that NSA simply knows a vulnerability that impacts one very specific lattice scheme and not the others
Ok. My argument is they know all lattice schemes are weak and the push to use a lattice-only scheme is precisely to have a cryptographic mechanism they can easily bypass without a classical known-secure backstop.