Comment by cryptonector
4 days ago
> I hate that his more tinfoil hat stuff (which is not totally unjustified, mind you) overshadows his sober technical contributions in these discussions.
Currently he argues that NSA is likely to be attacking the standards process to do some unspecified nefarious thing in PQ algorithms, and he's appealing to our memories of Dual_EC. That's not tinfoil hat stuff! It's a serious possibility that has happened before (Dual_EC). True, no one knows for a fact that NSA backdoored Dual_EC, but it's very very likely that they did -- why bother with such a slow DRBG if not for this benefit of being able to recover session keys?
NSA wrote Dual EC. A team of (mostly European) academic cryptographers wrote the CRYSTALS constructions. Moreover, the NOBUS mechanism in Dual EC is obvious, and it's not at all clear where you'd do anything like that in Kyber, which goes out of its way not to have the "weird constants" problem that the P-curves (which practitioners generally trust) ended up with.
It took a couple of years to get the suspicion about Dual_EC out.
No it didn't. The problem with Dual EC was published in a rump session at the next CRYPTO after NIST published it. The widespread assumption was that nobody was actually using it, which was enabled by the fact that the important "target" implementations (most importantly RSA BSAFE, which I think a lot of people also assumed wasn't in common use, but I may just be saying that because it's what I myself assumed) were deeply closed-source.
None of this applies to anything else besides Dual EC.
That aside: I don't know what this has to do with anything I just wrote. Did you mean to respond to some other comment?