And, dropping the pedantry, it's quite frustrating to be deliberately or casually or in whatever way misrepresented by drive-by commenters in an otherwise apt discussion thread. Your comment and the one tptacek responded to are patronizing and dismissive and really don't contribute to any interesting discourse on the topic. I think it's fair to dismiss stupid drive-by low-effort quips, personally.
If you don't understand what I wrote, ask questions. What you did instead was leap to stupid conclusions.
They are also known for making very specific arguments that people misinterpret and fight over, but the actual intent and literal meaning of the statements is most often correct (IMO).
Whether this is a byproduct of trying to be exacting in the language used that tends to cause people interpretive problems or a specific tactic to expose those that are a combination of careless with their reading and willing to make assumptions rather than ask questions is unknown to me, but that doesn't change how it tends to play out, from my perspective.
In this case, I'll throw you a bone and restate his position as I understand it.
NIST ran the competition in question in a way such that all the judges referred each other, and all are very well known in the cryptographic field, and the suggestion by someone with more common game that they could be bribes in this manner (note not that the NSA would not attempt it, but the implication they would succeed with the people in question) is extremely unlikely, and that DJB would suggest as much knowing his fame may matter to people more than the facts of who these people are, is problematic.
Regarding Dual_EC: we still lack a lot of information about how this decision was made internally at NIST. That’s a core point: transparency was promised in the wake of discovered sabotage and it hasn’t arrived.
The American people deserve to know who picked up the phone or held a meeting to make this happen. Who was present, who at NIST knew what, and so on. Who internally had objections and indeed who set the policy in the first place. What whistleblower protections were in place and why didn’t the IG have involvement in public? Why did we have to learn about this from Snowden?
NSA has a dual mandate, on that I hope we can agree. It’s my understanding that part of their job is to secure things and that part of their job is to break stuff.
NIST has no such dual mandate, heads should roll at NIST. We probably agree that NSA probably won’t be accountable in any meaningful sense, but NIST must be - we are stuck with them. Not trusting them isn’t an option for anyone who files their taxes or banks or does any number of other regulated activities that require using NIST standards.
> Whether this is a byproduct of trying to be exacting in the language used that tends to cause people interpretive problems or a specific tactic to expose those that are a combination of careless with their reading and willing to make assumptions rather than ask questions is unknown to me
Communicating badly and then acting smug when misunderstood is not cleverness (https://xkcd.com/169/).
If many people do not understand the argument being made, it doesn't matter how "exacting" the language is - the writer failed at communicating. I don't have a stake in this, but from afar this thread looks like tptacek making statements so terse as to be vague, and then going "Gotcha! That's not the right interpretation!" when somebody attempts to find some meaning in them.
In short: If standard advice is "you should ask questions to understand my point", you're doing it wrong. This isn't "HN gathers to tease wisdom out of tptacek" - it's on him to be understood by the readers (almost all of which are lurkers!). Unless he doesn't care about that, but only about shouting (what he thinks are) logically consistent statements into the void.
If you made me guess about why NIST denied his FOIA requests, I'd say that Bernstein probably royally pissed everyone at NIST off before he made those requests, and they denied them because they decided the requests were being made in bad faith.
But they don't get to do that, so they're going to be forced to give up the documents. I'm sure when that happens Bernstein will paint it as an enormous legal victory, but the fact is that these outcomes are absolutely routine.
When we were FOIA'ing the Police General Orders for all the suburbs of Chicago, my own municipality declined to release theirs. I'd already been working with Topic on a (much more important) FOIA case from a friend of mine, so I reached out asking for him to write a nastygram for me. The nastygram cost me money --- but he told me having him sue would not! It was literally cheaper for me to have him sue my town than to have him write a letter, because FOIA suits have fee recovery terms.
I really can't emphasize enough how much suing a public body to force compliance with FOIA is just a normal part of the process. It sucks! But it's utterly routine.
Why are you asking me, when I was clear I was just stating my interpretation of his position, and he had already replied to me with even more clarification to his position?
> Communicating badly and then acting smug when misunderstood is not cleverness
I don't disagree. My observations should not be taken as endorsement for a specific type of behavior, if that's indeed what is being done.
That said, while I may dislike how the conversation plays out, I can't ignore that very often he has an intricate and we'll thought out position that is expressed succinctly, and in the few cases where someone treats the conversation with respect and asks clarifying questions rather than makes assumptions the conversation is clear and understanding is quickly reached between most parties.
I'm hesitant to lay the blame all on one side when the other side is the one jumping to conclusions and then refusing to accept their mistake when it's pointed out.
https://youtu.be/kx_G2a2hL6U?t=177
(I don't have anything constructive to add to the conversation. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
If you RTFA you'd know it pertains to bribery, not coercion.
At the risk of belaboring the obvious: An attacker won't have to say "Oops, researcher X is working in public and has just found an attack; can we suppress this somehow?" if the attacker had the common sense to hire X years earlier, meaning that X isn't working in public. People arguing that there can't be sabotage because submission teams can't be bribed are completely missing the point.
He goes on to say: I coined the phrase "post-quantum cryptography" in 2003. It's not hard to imagine that the NSA/IDA post-quantum attack team was already hard at work before that, that they're years ahead of the public in finding attacks, and that NSA has been pushing NISTPQC to select algorithms that NSA secretly knows how to break.
Does this seem unreasonable, and if so, why?
He also remarks: Could such a weakness also be exploited by other large-scale attackers? Best bet is that the answer is yes. Would this possibility stop NSA from pushing for the weakness? Of course not.
Doesn’t sound to me like he only has concerns about bribery. Corruption of the standards to NSA’s benefit is one overarching issue. It’s not the only one, he has concerns about non-American capabilities as well.
The are many methods for the NSA to achieve a win.
Ridiculing people for worrying about this is totally lame and is harmful to the community.
To suggest a few dozen humans are beyond reproach from attack by the most powerful adversaries to ever exist is extremely naive at best. However that literally isn’t even a core point as Bernstein notes clearly.
I use djb’s crypto. Everybody knows his speculation. Everybody knows why he’s pursuing more information. Nobody disagrees more information would be a public good. Some people are more skeptical than others that he’ll find anything substantial.
> If you RTFA you'd know it pertains to bribery, not coercion
By quoting the article it seems the text directly contradicts your summary as being too narrow. General coercion is also be included as part of the concerns raised by TFA. He isn’t just talking about NSA giving a person a sack of money.
Meanwhile in this thread and on Twitter, many people are indeed doing the things you say that nobody is doing.
We almost all use Bernstein’s crypto — some as mere users, others as developers, etc. I’m not sure what that brings to the discussion.
I’m glad we agree that his work to gather more information is a public good.
maybe you don't know what risible means, but it reads like you're saying that the NSA "somehow" coercing someone is unlikely, which i'm sure you can agree is a "very naive and trusting view"