Comment by johncolanduoni
4 days ago
I don’t think IETF is in the pocket of the NSA. I really wish the US government hadn’t hassled Bernstein so much when he was a grad student, it would make his stuff way more focused on technical details and readable without rolling your eyes.
> Further, the people involved in the NIST PQ key establishment competition are a murderers row of serious cryptographers and cryptography engineers.
That’s actually my point! When you’re trying to figure out if your standard is difficult to implement correctly, that everyone who worked on the reference implementations is a genius who understands it perfectly is a disadvantage for finding certain problems. It’s classic expert blindness, like you see with C++ where the people working on the standard understand the language so completely they can’t even conceive of what will happen when it’s in the hands of someone that doesn’t sleep with the C++ standard under their pillow.
Like, would anyone who developed ECC algorithms have forgotten to check for invalid curve points when writing an implementation? Meanwhile among mere mortals that’s happened over and over again.
I don't think this has much of anything to do with Bernstein's qualms with the US government. For all his concerns about NIST process, he himself had his name on a NIST PQC candidate. Moreover, he's gotten into similar spats elsewhere. This isn't even the first time he's gotten into a heap of shit at IETF/IRTF. This springs to mind:
https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/cfrg/qqrtZnjV1oTBHtvZ1...
This wasn't about NSA or the USG! Note the date. Of course, had this happened in 2025, we'd all know about it, because he'd have blogged it.
But I want to circle back to the point I just made: you've said that we'd all be better off if there was a burning-in period for implementors before standards were ratified. We've definitely burnt in MLKEM now! What would we have done differently knowing what we now know?
> What would we have done differently knowing what we now know?
With the MLKEM standard? Probably nothing, Bernstein would have done less rambling in these blog posts if he was aware of something specifically wrong with one of the implementations. My key point here was that establishing an implementation phase during standardization is not an incoherent or categorically unjustifiable idea, whether it makes sense for massive cryptographic development efforts or not. I will note that something not getting caught by a potential process change is a datapoint that it’s not needed, but isn’t dispositive.
I do think there is some baby in the Bernstein bathwater that is this blog post series though. His strongest specific point in these posts was that the TLS working group adding a cipher suite with a MLKEM-only key exchange this early is an own goal (but that’s of course not the fault of the MLKEM standard itself). That’s an obvious footgun, and I’ll miss the days when you could enable all the standard TLS 1.3 cipher suites and not stress about it. The arguments to keep it in are legitimately not good, but in the area director’s defense we’re all guilty of motivated reasoning when you’re talking to someone who will inevitably accuse you of colluding with the NSA to bring about 1984.
In what way is adding an MLKEM-only code point an "own goal"? Exercise for the reader: find the place where Bernstein proposed we have hybrid RSA/ECDH ciphersuites.