Re:The strange story of “Extended Random”
by tptacek on Saturday December 23, 2017 @07:40PM
(#15997204)
They've never formally taken cryptographic advice from the NSA. For a good long while, the chair of the IRTF CFRG was Kevin Igoe, who worked for NSA. CFRG is now chaired by Kenny Paterson, and has been for several years. Even during the Igoe years, IETF process is open; if IETF suffers from undue NSA influence, it's a consequence of people generally being too disengaged to push back on anything.
IETF crypto work is particularly painful, as the noisiest people involved in the process are not, as a rule, the most crypto-literate.
As always, it's worth remembering that at the time extended-random was standardized, nobody --- including cryptographers --- worried about exposing RNG output on the wire. If anything, we had the opposite concern, after the Debian fiasco. Extended-random is shady, and I now lean towards Matthew Green's take on it, but that comes from a much more recent perspective on this stuff.
IETF crypto work is particularly painful, as the noisiest people involved in the process are not, as a rule, the most crypto-literate.
As always, it's worth remembering that at the time extended-random was standardized, nobody --- including cryptographers --- worried about exposing RNG output on the wire. If anything, we had the opposite concern, after the Debian fiasco. Extended-random is shady, and I now lean towards Matthew Green's take on it, but that comes from a much more recent perspective on this stuff.