Of course I'm not saying that either of those things happened, nor that they would be easy to accomplish. Hell, maybe they're literally impossible and I just don't understand enough cryptography to know why. Maybe the NIST truly has our best interest at heart this time. I'm just saying that, to me, it doesn't seem impossible for the NIST to ensure that the winner of their cryptography contests is an algorithm that's subtly broken. And given that there's even a slight possibility, maybe distrusting the NIST recommendations isn't a bad idea. They do after all have a history of trying to make the world adopt subtly broken cryptography.
But we must also recognize a difference in degree. In a competition where the US has no official influence over the result, there has to be a huge conspiracy to affect which algorithm is chosen. But in the competition which actually happened, they may potentially just need a single plant on one of the strong teams, and if that plant is successful in introducing subtle brokenness into the algorithm without anyone noticing, the NIST can just declare that team's algorithm as the winner.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to dismiss this possibility. I also think it's reasonable to recognize the extreme untrustworthiness of the NIST and decide to not trust them if there's even a conceivable way that they might've messed with the outcome of their competition. I really can't know what the right choice is.
For what it's worth, I do think the US government could corrupt academic cryptographers. If I was an academic cryptographer, and someone from the US government told me to do something immoral or else they would, say, kill my family, and they gave me reason to believe the threat was genuine, I'm not so sure I wouldn't have done what they told me. And I know this sounds like spy movie shit, but this is the US government.
One last thing though, if you're giving me the black and white choice between blindly trusting the outcome of a US government cryptography standard competition or distrusting the field of cryptography altogether, I choose the latter.
Note that the “forcing someone to comply” thing was just meant as one possibility among many, I don’t see why you completely dismiss the idea of someone who’s good at cryptography being in on the US’s mission to intercept people’s communications. I mean the NSA seems to be full of those kinds of people. You also dismiss the possibility that they just … picked the algorithm that they thought they could break after analysing it, with no participant being in on anything. But I get the feeling that you’re not really interested in engaging with this topic anymore, so I’ll leave it at that. It’s already late here.
Secrets are hard to keep at scale. Trying to do it with coercion, to a group of people who's entire field of study is covert communication, seems like an unenviable prospect.
Nobody says that (not that I've seen).
My reading is that he's a combative academic, railing against a standards body that refuses to say how they're working, with a deserved reputation for dishonesty and shenanigans.
> The point isn't that NIST is trustworthy. The point is that the PQC finalist teams are comprised of academic cryptographers from around the world with unimpeachable reputations, and it's ludicrous to suggest that NSA could have compromised them.
> The whole point of the competition structure is that you don't simply have to trust NIST; the competitors (and cryptographers who aren't even entrants in the contest) are peer reviewing each other, and NIST is refereeing.
>What Bernstein is counting on here is that his cheering section doesn't know the names of any cryptographers besides "djb", Bruce Schneier, and maybe, just maybe, Joan Daemen. If they knew anything about who the PQC team members were, they'd shoot milk out their nose at the suggestion that NSA had suborned backdoors from them. What's upsetting is that he knows this, and he knows you don't know this, and he's exploiting that.
---
> I spent almost 2 decades as a Daniel Bernstein ultra-fan --- he's a hometown hero, and also someone whose work was extremely important to me professionally in the 1990s, and, to me at least, he has always been kind and cheerful; he even tried to give us some ideas for ECC challenges for Cryptopals. I know what it's like to be in the situation of (a) deeply admiring Bernstein and (b) only really paying attention to one cryptographer in the world (Bernstein).
> But talk to a bunch of other cryptographers --- and, also, learn about the work a lot of other cryptographers are doing --- and you're going to hear stories. I'm not going to say Bernstein has a bad reputation; for one thing, I'm not qualified to say that, and for another I don't think "bad" is the right word. So I'll put it this way: Bernstein has a fucked up reputation in his field. I am not at all happy to say that, but it's true.
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32365259, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32368598)