Comment by tptacek

The problem with Dual EC isn't the sketchy "constants", but rather the structure of the construction, which is a random number generator that works by doing a public key transformation on its state. Imagine CTR-DRBG, but standardized with a constant AES key. You don't so much wonder about the provenance of the key so much as wonder why the fuck there's a key there at all.

I don't know of any cryptographer or cryptography engineer that takes the SHA3 innuendo seriously. Do you?

Additional backstory that might be helpful here: about 10 years ago, Bernstein invested a pretty significant amount of time on a research project designed to illustrate that "nothing up my sleeves" numbers, like constants formed from digits of pi, e, etc, could be used to backdoor standards. When we're talking about people's ability to cast doubt on standards, we should keep in mind that the paragon of that idea believes it to be true of pi.

I'm fine with that, for what it's worth. Cryptography standards are a force for evil. You can just reject the whole enterprise of standardizing cryptography of any sort, and instead work directly from reference designs from cryptographers. That's more or less how Chapoly came to be, though it's standardized now.