← Back to context

Comment by philodeon

4 days ago

I didn’t see anything “batshit” in either the paper or the slides.

Say more. What do you think of his argument? I paraphrased it downthread. Do you think I did so accurately? If not: what did I get wrong?

  • At least in terms of the Bada55 paper, I think he writes in a fairly jocular style that sounds unprofessional unless you read his citations as well. You seem to object to his occasional jocularity and take it as prima facie evidence of him being “batshit”. Given that you are well known for a jocular writing style, perhaps you should extend some grace.

    The slides seem like a pretty nice summary of the 2015-era SafeCurves work, which you acknowledge elsewhere on this site (this thread? They all blend together) was based on good engineering.

    • No, what I'm saying has only to do with the substance of his claims, which I now think you don't understand, because I laid them out straightforwardly (I might have been wrong, but I definitely wasn't making a tone argument) and you came back with this. People actually do work in this field. You can't just bluster your way through it.

      This is a "challenge" with discussing Bernstein claims on Hacker News and places like it --- the threads are full of people who know two cryptographers in the whole world (Bernstein and Schneier) and axiomatically derive their claims from "whatever those two said is probably true". It's the same way you get these inane claims that Kyber was backdoored by the NSA --- by looking at the list of authors on Kyber and not recognizing a single one of them.

      What do you think about Bernstein's arguments for SNTRUP being safe while Kyber isn't? Super curious. I barely follow. Maybe you've got a better grip on the controversy.

      5 replies →