Comment by tptacek
1 day ago
This CBC chaining thing is my all-time absolute favorite cryptography conspiracy theory, because on the IETF list where it happened (it happened for IPSEC, not for TLS, for what it's worth) Phil Rogaway pled with long-time standards body people --- even took up a petition of cryptographers, including Rivest --- and was openly and viciously mocked for the attempt.
The US government had no need to corrupt IPSEC standardization. The IETF did the work for them without prompting.
Hello, the US government paid the IPSEC devs to include weak and backdoored algos back then. All revealed during the Snowden era
Nobody thinks the people who shouted down Phil Rogaway, who include relatively famous standards nerds, were NSA plants. It's uncharitable for me to keep calling them out by name, but IYKYK.
You have far more to fear from standards bodies just acting like standards bodies (limited recent exceptions notwithstanding) than from government interference with standards. Like I said, all NSA usually needs to do is sit back and wait for standards groups to come up with Heartbleed on their own.