Comment by tptacek

4 days ago

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.

I’m not sure why you’re hung up on SNTRUP, since DJB didn’t submit it past round 2 of NISTPQC. In round 3, DJB put his full weight behind Classic McEliece.

You’ve previously argued that “cryptosystems based on ring-LWE hardness have been worked on by giants in the field since the mid-1990s” and suggested this is a point in Kyber’s favor. Well, news flash, McEliece has been worked on by giants in the field for 45 years. It shows up in NSA’s declassified internal history book, though their insights into the crypto system are still classified to this day.

  • How long do you think people have been working on lattice cryptography?

    • Lattices themselves have been analyzed since the days of Gauss. Lattice cryptography is only a couple decades old (in the unclassified literature).

      The first proposed lattice-based cryptosystem was completely broken within 2 years of its announcement, which is an lovely harbinger of Kyber’s fate.

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