Comment by onetimeusename
3 years ago
ok, thanks. I didn't know that about djb's history as far as picking fights with standards groups. I don't know much about him outside of the primitives he designed. That makes some sense in context now because the implication just seemed like a stretch. Cryptosystems break and have flaws in them, that's nothing new. It's just strange to leap to "The NSA did it", but again, I didn't know he just tends to accuse people of that.
I agree about the PQC stuff and committees. Anyways, thanks for clarifying this.
Just bear in mind that this is just opinions and hearsay on my part. Like, I think there's value in relaying what I think I know and what I've heard, but I'm not a cryptographer, I paid almost no attention to the PQC stuff (in fact, I pretty much only ever swapped PQC into my resident set when Bernstein managed to start drama with other cryptographers whose names I knew), and there are possibly other sides to these stories. I've seen Bernstein drama where it's pretty clear he's deeply in the wrong, and I've seen Bernstein drama where it's pretty clear he wasn't.
The suit is good. NIST isn't allowed to clown up FOIA; they have to do it right.