I guess I'm not reading it that way. In fact, a FOIA request is going after official records, which I wouldn't expect would contain outright bribery.

Yes, DJB brings up their known bribing of RSA wrt to the whole Dual-EC thing. But my read of that bit of info was the more general 'here's evidence that the NSA actively commits funding towards infecting standards' rather than 'the NSA's playbook just contains outright bribery and that's what we expect to find in the FOIA requests given to NIST'.

The FOIA issue is 100% legitimate. NIST is required to comply with FOIA.

You don’t get it clearly. They’re playing dirty. At best the FOIA will receive a document made on the fly with nothing of value. The rules don’t apply to the NSA. You can do exactly nothing. But NIST, you can do something about - reject any standard they approve. It’s your choice what algorithm you use, and we know NIST will select a broken algorithm for the NSA, so just ignore their ‘standard’. The best solution is using layers of crypto, trusting no single algorithm.

You should tell Bernstein that! Your logic implies he's wasting his time with the suit.

"You shouldn't fight because the baddies are strong!" is a horrible argument in my book. Discouraging and disparaging other people's attempts is even worse.

I’m not saying don’t fight. I’m saying don’t let your opponent define the rules of the game.

he is

The actual claim is that NSA may have already spent a lot of time and effort to analyse PQC algorithm underlying problems without making their findings public.

DJB seems to suspect that they may influence NIST to select algorithms and parameters within the range of what they already know how to break.

Huh? Of course NSA spent a lot of time and effort analyzing algorithms without making their findings public. That is their literal job. The peer review NIST is refereeing happened in the open. When people broke SIDH, they didn't whisper it anyone's ear: they published a paper. That's how this stuff works. Bernstein doesn't have a paper to show you; all he has is innuendo. How you know his argument is as limp as a cooked spaghetti noodle is that he actually stoops to suggesting that NSA might have bribed one of the members of the PQC teams.

If he had something real to say, he wouldn't have embarrassed himself like that. How I think I know that is, I think any reasonable person would go way out of their way to avoid such an embarrassing claim, absent extraordinary evidence, of which he's presented none.

It is very hard to not take this comment as being made in bad faith. You either are willfully ignorant or have ulterior motives.

It is a matter of public record (as also detailed again in the article) that the NSA colluded with NIST to get weakened crypto standardised. This happened not only once but multiple times and they when weaknesses become known have repeatedly (and against better knowledge) downplayed the impact. This is undisputed. After the Dual EC skandal they promised that they would be more transparent in the future. DJB alleges that there is important information missing on the decision making processes in the most recent PQC discussion (I am willing to trust him on that, but if you are an expert in the field I'm sure you can elaborate here why it is incorrect). That's why did an FOI request which has not been answered and he is now filing a lawsuit over.

I would argue based on past behaviour we should trust DJB much more than either the NSA or NIST, but it seems you are more occupied with unsubstantially attacking his person than getting to the truth.

> he actually stoops to suggesting that NSA might have bribed one of the members of the PQC teams

I don't know anyone in the teams to judge their moral fiber, but I'm 100% sure the NSA is not above what is suggested and your weird outrage at the suggestion seems surprising knowing what is public knowledge about how the NSA operates.

There are arguments here about NSA pressure on NIST. You miss the point because apparently you're offended that someone suggested your friends can be bribed. I mean, maybe they can't, but this is about the NSA being corrupt, not the researchers.

It can be everybody involved. It should include NIST based on the history alone.

Some of the commentary on this topic is by people who also denied DUAL_EC until (correctly) conceding that it was actually a backdoor, actually deployed, and that it is embarrassing for both NSA and NIST.

This sometimes looks like reactionary denialism. It’s a safe position that forces others to do a lot of work, it seems good faith with some people and not so much with others.

I'm people who denied that Dual EC was a backdoor (my position wasn't an unusual one; it was that Dual EC was too stupid to actually use, which made it an unlikely backdoor). Dan Bernstein didn't educate me about that; like anybody else who held that position, the moment I learned that real products in the industry were built with libraries that defaulted to Dual EC, the jig was up.

I'm honest about what I'm saying and what I've said. You are not meeting the same bar. For instance, here you're insinuating that my problem on this thread is that I think NIST is good, or trustworthy, or that NSA would never have the audacity to try to bribe anybody. Of course, none of that is true.

I don't know how seriously you expect anybody to take you. You wrote 13-paragraph comment on this thread based on Filippo's use of an "It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia Meme", saying that it was a parody of "A Beautiful Mind", which is about John Nash, who was mentally ill, and also an anti-semite, ergo Filippo Valsorda is an anti-semite who punches down at the mentally ill. It's right there for everybody to read.

How could any serious security researcher have been in doubt about Dual EC? The design did not not make any sense at all. Not until you consider that it is designed with a back door, then it is a sleek minimal design that does exactly what it needs to do and not a whole lot more.

If you couldn't see that from a mile away, then you might be too naive to work in security.

I don't know, why don't you take this question to Bruce Schneier?

"Sleek, minimal design". Heh.

I'm pretty comfortable with the people who do and don't take me seriously.