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Comment by tptacek

4 days ago

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?