While a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley, Bernstein completed the development of an encryption equation (an "algorithm") he calls "Snuffle." Bernstein wishes to publish a) the algorithm (b) a mathematical paper describing and explaining the algorithm and (c) the "source code" for a computer program that incorporates the algorithm. Bernstein also wishes to discuss these items at mathematical conferences, college classrooms and other open public meetings. The Arms Export Control Act and the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (the ITAR regulatory scheme) required Bernstein to submit his ideas about cryptography to the government for review, to register as an arms dealer, and to apply for and obtain from the government a license to publish his ideas. Failure to do so would result in severe civil and criminal penalties. Bernstein believes this is a violation of his First Amendment rights and has sued the government.
After four years and one regulatory change, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that software source code was speech protected by the First Amendment and that the government's regulations preventing its publication were unconstitutional.
The whole world ignores the principles out of convenience. Principles are thrown out the window at the first sign of adversity. People get rich by corrupting and violating principles. It seems like despite all efforts the corrupting forces win anyway. I have no idea how these people find the willpower to keep fighting literal government agencies.
> This time, he chose to represent himself, although he had no formal legal training. On October 15, 2003, almost nine years after Bernstein first brought the case, the judge dismissed it....
To be more specific, the government broke out their get out of court free card and claimed they weren't threatening to prosecute him even though they created a rule he was intending to violate. It's a dirty trick the government uses when they're afraid you're going to win so they can get the case dismissed without the court making a ruling.
djb has been consistent in view for decades that cryptography standards need to consider the foolproofness of implementation so that a minor implementation mistake specific to timing of specific instructions on specific CPU architectures, or specific compiler optimisations, etc doesn't break the implementation. See for example the many problems of NIST P-224/P-256/P-384 ECC curves which djb has been instrumental in fixing through widespread deployment of X25519.[3][4][5]
[1] https://cryspen.com/post/ml-kem-implementation/
[2] https://kyberslash.cr.yp.to/faq.html / https://kyberslash.cr.yp.to/libraries.html
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_curve_point_multiplic...
Not a criticism, if anything it reinforces DJB's point. But it makes clear that ease of (proper) implementation also needs to cover things like proper canonicalization of relevant security variables and that supporting multiple modes of operation doesn't actually lead to different answers of security questions meant to give the same answer.
If anything, standardization encourages more investment, which means more eyeballs to identify and plug those holes.
I’d actually like to see more (non-cryptographic) standards take this into account. Many web standards are so complicated and/or ill-specified that trillion dollar market cap companies have trouble implementing them correctly/consistently. Standards shouldn’t just be thrown over the wall and have any problems blamed on the implementations.
This argument is without merit. ML-KEM/Kyber has already been ratified as the PQC KEM standard by NIST. What you are proposing is that the NIST process was fundamentally flawed. This is a claim that requires serious evidence as backup.
NIST can adopt and recommend whatever algorithms they might like using whatever criteria they decide they want to use. However, while the amount of expertise and experience on display by NIST in identifying algorithms that are secure or potentially useful is impressive, there is no amount of expertise or experience that guarantees any given implementation is always feasible.
Indeed, this is precisely why elliptic curve algorithms are often not available, in spite of a NIST standard being adopted like 8+ years ago!
If we did that we'd all be using Dual_EC...
I hate that his more tinfoil hat stuff (which is not totally unjustified, mind you) overshadows his sober technical contributions in these discussions.
Isn't that how you advance a field, though?
It has been a couple hundred years, but we used to think that disease was primarily caused by "bad humors".
Fields can and do advance. I'm not versed enough to say whether his criticisms are legitimate, but this doesn't sound like a problem, but part of the process, to me (and his article is documenting how some bureaucrats/illegitimate interests are blocking that advancement).
The "area adminstrator" being unable or unwilling to do basic math is both worrying, and undermines the idea that the standards that are being produced are worth anything, which is bad for the entire field.
If the standards are chock full of nonsense, then how does that reflect upon the field?
Currently he argues that NSA is likely to be attacking the standards process to do some unspecified nefarious thing in PQ algorithms, and he's appealing to our memories of Dual_EC. That's not tinfoil hat stuff! It's a serious possibility that has happened before (Dual_EC). True, no one knows for a fact that NSA backdoored Dual_EC, but it's very very likely that they did -- why bother with such a slow DRBG if not for this benefit of being able to recover session keys?
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?
I'm familiar with Bernstein's argument about AES, but AES is also the most successful cryptography standard ever created.
I'm not contesting AES's success or saying it doesn't deserve it. I'm not even saying we should move off it (especially now that even most mobile processors have AES instructions). But nobody would put something like a S-Box in a cipher created today.
Part of this, though, is that it's also kind of an incoherent standard to hold reference implementations to. Science proceeds long after the standard is written! The best/safest possible implementation is bound to change.
I'm not saying cryptography should necessarily work this way, but it's not an unworkable policy to have multiple projects implement a draft before settling on a standard.
Certainly, if you're going to do standards adoption by open competition the way NIST has done with AES, SHA3, and MLKEM, you're not going to be able to factor multiple major implementations into your process.
* Wait for 10 years of cryptanalysis (specific to the final algorithm) before using anything, which probably will be relatively meager because nobody is using it
* Expect the standardization process itself to produce a blessed artifact, to be set on fire as a false god if it turns out to be imperfect (or more realistically, just cause everybody a bunch of pain for 20 years)
Nothing would stop NIST from adding a post-competition phase where Google, Microsoft, Amazon, whoever the hell is maintaining OpenSSL, and maybe Mozilla implement the algorithm in their respective libraries and kick the tires. Maybe it’s pointless and everything we’d expect to get from cryptographers observing that process for a few months to a year has already been suitably covered, and DJB is just being prissy. I don’t know enough about cryptanalysis to know.
But I do feel very confident that many of the IETF standards I’ve been on the receiving end of could have used a non-reference implementation phase to find practical, you-could-technically-do-it-right-but-you-won’t issues that showed up within the first 6 months of people trying to use the damn thing.
If by that you mean "perfect the implementation", we already get that! The MLKEM in Go is not the MLKEM in OpenSSL is not the MLKEM in AWS-LC.
If instead you mean "figure out after some period of implementation whether the standard itself is good", I don't know how that's meant to be workable. It's the publication of the standard itself that is the forcing function for high-quality competing implementations. In particular, part of arriving at high-quality implementations is running them in production, which is something you can't do without solving the coordination problem of getting everyone onto the same standard.
Here it's important to note that nothing we've learned since Kyber was chosen has materially weakened the construction itself. We've had in fact 3 years now of sustained (urgent, in fact) implementation and deployment (after almost 30 years of cryptologic work on lattices). What would have been different had Kyber been a speculative or proposed standard, other than it getting far less attention and deployment?
("Prissy" is not the word I personally would choose here.)
> If instead you mean "figure out after some period of implementation whether the standard itself is good", I don't know how that's meant to be workable.
The forcing function can potentially be: this final draft is the heir apparent. If nothing serious comes up in the next 6 months, it will be summarily finalized.
It’s possible this won’t get any of the implementers off their ass on a reasonable timeframe - this happens with web standards all the time. It’s also possible that this is very unlikely to uncover anything not already uncovered. Like I said, I’m not totally convinced that in this specific field it makes sense. But your arguments against it are fully general against this kind of phased process at all, and I think it has empirically improved recent W3C and IETF standards (including QUIC and HTTP2/3) a lot compared to the previous method.
Further, the people involved in the NIST PQ key establishment competition are a murderers row of serious cryptographers and cryptography engineers. All of them had the knowhow and incentive to write implementations of their constructions and, if it was going to showcase some glaring problem, of their competitors. What makes you think that we lacked implementation understanding during this process?
> 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.
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?
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.
What are those problems exactly? The whitepaper from djb only makes vague claims about NSA being a malicious actor, but after ~20 years no known backdoors nor intentional weaknesses has been reliably proven?
On the other hand, Curve25519 is designed from the ground up to be hard to implement incorrectly: there are very few footguns, gotchas, and edge cases. This means that real-world implementations are likely to be correct implementations of the theoretical algorithm.
This means that, even if P-224/P-256/P-384 are on paper exactly as secure as Curve25519, they could still end up being significantly weaker in practice.
In TLS, Curve25519 vs. the P-curves are a total non-issue, because TLS isn't generally deployed anymore in ways that even admit point validation vulnerabilities (even if implementations still had them). That bit, I already knew, but I'd assumed ad-hoc non-TLS implementations, by random people who don't know what point validation is, might tip the scales. Turns out guess not.
Again, by way of bona fides: I woke up this morning in your camp, regarding Curve25519. But that won't be the camp I go to bed in.
Any reference for the "really hard" part? That is a very interesting subject and I can't imagine it's independent of the environment and development stack being used.
I'd welcome any standard that's "really hard to implement correctly" as a testbed for improving our compilers and other tools.
That is, an algorithm and compiler and tool safety smoke test and improvement thereby is good. But you also need to think hard about what happens when someone induces an RF pulse at specific timings targeted at a certain part of a circuit board, say, when you're trying to harden these algorithmic implementations. Lots of things that compiler architects typically say is "not my problem".
Usually it’s really hard to distinguish intent, and so it’s possible to develop plausible deniability with committees. Their track record isn’t perfect.
With WPA3 cryptographers warned about the known pitfall of standardizing a timing sensitive PAKE, and Harkin got it through anyway. Since it was a standard, the WiFi committee gladly selected it anyway, and then resulted in dragonbleed among other bugs. The techniques for hash2curve have patched that
When you're talking about the P-curves, I'm curious how you get your "sanity check" argument past things like the Koblitz/Menezes "Riddle Wrapped In An Enigma" paper. What part of their arguments did you not find persuasive?
The riddle paper I’ve not read in a long time if ever, though I don’t understand the question. As Scott Aaronson recently blogged it’s difficult to predict human progress with technology and it’s possible we’ll see shors algorithm running publicly sooner than consensus. It could be that in 2035 the NSA’s call 20 years prior looks like it was the right one in that ECC is insecure but that wouldn’t make the replacements secure by default ofc
If you haven't read the Enigma paper, you should do so before confidently stating that nobody's done "sanity checks" on the P-curves. Its authors are approximately as authoritative on the subject as Aaronson is on his. I am specifically not talking about the question of NSA's recommendation on ECC vs. PQ; I'm talking about the integrity of the P-curve selection, in particular. You need to read the paper to see the argument I'm making; it's not in the abstract.
Instead I was stating that weaknesses in cryptography have been historically put there with some NSA involvement at times.
For DB: The brain pool curves do have a worse leak, but as stated in the dragon blood paper “we believe that these sidechannels are inherent to Dragonfly”. The first attack submission did hit P-256 setups before the minimal iteration count was increased and afterward was more applicable to same-system cache/ micro architectural bugs. These attacks were more generally correctly mitigated when H2C deterministic algorithms rolled out. There’s many bad choices that were selected of course to make the PAKE more exploitable, putting the client MAC in the pre commits, having that downgrade, including brain pool curves. but to my point on committees— cryptographers warned strongly when standardizing that this could be an attack and no course correction was taken.
I'm confused as to what "the paper which led to Heartbleed" means. A paper proposing/describing the heartbeat extension? A paper proposing its implementation in OpenSSL? A paper describing the bug/exploit? Something else?
And in addition to that, is there any connection between that author and the people who actually wrote the relevant (buggy) OpenSSL code? If the people who wrote the bug were entirely unrelated to the people authoring the paper then it's not clear to me why any blame should be placed on the paper authors.
The original paper which proposed the OpenSSL Heartbeat extension was written by two people, one worked for NSA and one was a student at the time who went on to work for BND, the "German NSA". The paper authors also wrote the extension.
I know this because when it happened, I wanted to know who was responsible for making me patch all my servers, so I dug through the OpenSSL patch stream to find the authors.
This statement makes it clear to me that you don't understand a thing I've said, and that you don't have the necessary background knowledge of Heartbleed, the XZ backdoor, or concepts such a plausible deniability to engage in useful conversation about any of them. Else you would not be so confused.
Please do some reading on all three. And if you want to have a conversation afterwards, feel free to make a comment which demonstrates a deeper understanding of the issues at hand.
That's a very easy question to answer: the implementation the authors provided alongside it.
If you expect authors of exploits to clearly explain them to you, you are not just ignorant of the details of backdoors like the one in XZ (CMake was never backdoored, a "typo" in a CMake file bootstrapped the exploit in XZ builds), but are naive to an implausible degree about the activities of exploit authors.
Even the University of Minnesota did not publicly state "we're going to backdoor the Linux kernel" before they attempted to do so: https://cyberir.mit.edu/site/how-university-got-itself-banne...
If you tell someone you're going to build an exploit and how, the obvious response will be "no, we won't allow you to." So no exploit author does that.
I think your complaint isn't with me, but with people who hedge when confronted with direct questions. I think if you look at the thread, you'll see I wasn't exactly playing cards close to my chest.
Informing one's self is a pretty low bar for having a productive conversation. When one party can't be arsed to take the initiative to do so, that usually signals the end of useful interaction.
A comment like "I googled and found this paper... it says X... that means Y to me." would feel much less like someone just looking for an argument, because it involves effort and stating a position.
If he has a point, he's free to make it. Everything he needs is at his fingertips, and there's nothing I could do to stop him, nor would I want to. I asked for a point first thing. All I've gotten in response is combative rhetoric which is neither interesting nor informative.
We’re writing a document “Security dangers of the NIST curves”
Focus on the prime-field NIST curves
DLP news relevant to these curves? No
DLP on these curves seems really hard
So what’s the problem?
Answer: If you implement the NIST curves, chances are you’re doing it wrong
Your code produces incorrect results for some rare curve points
Your code leaks secret data when the input isn’t a curve point
Your code leaks secret data through branch timing
Your code leaks secret data through cache timing
Even more trouble in smart cards: power, EM, etc.
Theoretically possible to do it right, but very hard
Can anyone show us software for the NIST curves done right?
Curve25519 was a materially important engineering advance over the state of the art in P-curve implementations when it was introduced. There was a window of time within which Curve25519 foreclosed on Internet-exploitable vulnerabilities (and probably a somewhat longer period of time where it foreclosed on some embedded vulnerabilities). That window of time has pretty much closed now, but it was real at the time.
But he also does a handwavy thing about how the P-curves could have been backdoored. No practicing cryptgraphy engineer I'm aware of takes these arguments seriously, and to buy them you have to take Bernstein's side over people like Neil Koblitz.
The P-curve backdoor argument is unserious, but the P-curve implementation stuff has enough of a solid kernel to it that he can keep both arguments alive.
† as I remember it
Here's the thing. The existence of a standard does not mean we need to use it for most of the internet. There will also be hybrid standards, and most of the rest of us can simply ignore the existence of ML-KEM -only. However, NSA's CNSA 2.0 (commercial cryptography you can sell to the US Federal Government) does not envisage using hybrid schemes. So there's some sense in having a standard for that purpose. Better developed through the IETF than forced on browser vendors directly by the US, I think. There was rough consensus to do this. Should we have a single-cipher kex standard for HQC too? I'd argue yes, and no the NSA don't propose to use it (unless they updated CNSA).
The requirement of the NIST competition is that all standardized algorithms are both classical and PQ-resistant. Some have said in this thread that lattice crypto is relatively new, but it actually has quite some history, going back to Atjai in '97. If you want paranoia, there's always code theory based schemes going back to around '75. We don't know what we don't know, which is why there's HQC (code based) waiting on standardisation and an additional on-ramp for signatures, plus the expensive (size and sometimes statefulness) of hash-based options. So there's some argument that single-cipher is fine, and we have a whole set of alternative options.
This particular overreaction appears to be yet another in a long running series of... disagreements with the entire NIST process, including "claims" around the security level of what we then called Kyber, insults to the NIST team's security level estimation in the form of suggesting they can't do basic arithmetic (given we can't factor anything bigger than 15 on a real quantum computer and we simply don't have hardware anywhere near breaking RSA, estimate is exactly what these are) and so on.
Since ML-KEM is supported by the NSA, it should be assumed to have a NSA-known backdoor that they want to be used as much as possible: IETF standardization is a great opportunity for a long term social engineering operation, much like DES, Clipper, the more recent funny elliptic curve, etc.
AES and RSA are also supported by the NSA, but that doesn’t mean they were backdoored.
The standardization of an obviously weaker option than more established ones is difficult to explain with security reasons, so the default assumption should be that there are insecurity reasons.
I disagree that ML-KEM is "obviously weaker". In some ways, lattice-based cryptography has stronger hardness foundations than RSA and EC (specifically, average -> worst case reductions).
ML-KEM and EC are definitely complementary, and I would probably only deploy hybrids in the near future, but I don't begrudge others who wish to do pure ML-KEM.
I have no knowledge of whether Kyber at this point is vulnerable given whatever private cryptanalysis the NSA definitely has done on it, but if Kyber is adopted now, it will definitely be in use 2 decades from now, and it's hard to believe that it won't be vulnerable/broken then (even with only publicly available information).
Lots of algorithms were broken, but so what? Things like Rainbow and SIKE are not at all based on the hardness of solving lattice problems.
Can you elaborate on the standard of scrutiny that you believe AES and RSA (which were standardized at two very different maturation points in applied cryptography) met that hasn't been applied to the NIST PQ process?
The thing is these algorithms have been under discussion for quite some time. If you're not deeply into cryptography it might not appear this way, but these are essentially iterations on many earlier designs and ideas and have been built up cumulatively over time. Overall it doesn't seem there are any major concerns that anyone has identified.
But that's not what we're actually talking about. We're talking about whether creating an IETF RFC for people who want to use solely use ML-KEM is acceptable or not - and given the most famous organization proposing to do this is the US Federal Government it seems bizarre in the extreme to accuse them of backdooring what they actually intend to use for themselves. As I said, though, this does not preclude the rest of the industry having and using hybrid KEMs, which given what cloudflare, google etc are doing we likely will.
If you want a better analogy, we have a seatbelt for cars right now. It turns out when you steal plutonium and hot-rod your DeLorean into a time machine, these seatbelts don't quite cut the mustard. So we need a new kind of seatbelt. We design one that should be as good for the school run as it is for time travel to 1955.
We think we've done it but even after extensive testing we're not quite sure. So the debate is whether to put on two seatbelts (one traditional one we know works for traditional driving, and one that should be good for both) or if we can just use the new one on the school run and for going to 1955.
We are nowhere near DeLoreans that can travel to 1955 either.
Can you elaborate please?
ML-KEM/ML-DSA were adapted into standards by NIST, but I don't think a single American was involved in the actual initial design.
There might be some weakness the NSA knows about that the rest of us don't, but the fact they're going ahead and recommending these be used for US government systems suggests they're fine with it. Unless they want to risk this vulnerability also being discovered by China/Russia and used to read large portions of USG internet traffic. In their position I would not be confident that if I was aware of a vulnerability it would remain secret, although I am not a US Citizen or even resident, and never have been.
My point was more that it looked suspicious at the time (why use a trapdoor in a CSPRNG) and at least the possibility of "escrow" was known, as evidenced by the fact that Vanstone (one of the inventors of elliptic curve cryptography) patented said backdoor around 2006.
This suspiciousness simply doesn't apply to ML-KEM, if one ignores one very specific cryptographer.
First, we both wanted to get rid of static RSA and standardize on a DH-style exchange. This also allowed us to move the first encrypted message in 1-RTT mode to the first flight from the server. You'll note that while TLS 1.3 supports KEMs for PQ, they are run in the opposite direction from TLS 1.2, with the client supplying the public key and the server signing the transcript, just as with DH.
Second, TLS 1.3 made a number of changes to the negotiation which necessitated defining new code points, such as separating symmetric algorithm negotiation from asymmetric algorithm negotiation. When those new code points were defined, we just didn't register a lot of the older algorithms. In the specific case of symmetric algorithms, we also only. use AEAD-compatible encryption, which restricted the space further. Much of the motivation here was security, but it was also about implementation convenience because implementers didn't want to support a lot of algorithms for TLS 1.3.
It's worth noting that at roughly the same time, TLS relaxed the rules for registering new code points, so that you can register them without an RFC. This allows people to reserve code points for their own usage, but doesn't require the IETF to get involved and (hopefully) reduces pressure on other implementers to actually support those code points.
His concern is that NSA will get vendors to ship code that will prefer ML-KEM, which, not being a hybrid of ECC and PQC, will be highly vulnerable should ML-KEM turn out to be weak, and then there's the concern that it might be backdoored -- that this is a Dual_EC redux.
This is going to happen anyway (non hybrid) at least inside USG because that's what NSA want.
No, that's background dressing by now. The bigger issue is how IETF is trying to railroad a standard by violating its own procedures, ignoring all objections, and banning people who oppose it.
They are literally doing the kind of thing we always accuse China of doing. ML-KEM-only is obviously being pushed for political reasons. If you're not willing to let a standard be discussed on its technical merits, why even pretend to have a technology-first industry working group?
Seeing standards being corrupted like this is sickening. At least have the gall openly claim it should be standardized because it makes things easier for the NSA - and by extension (arguably) increasing national security!
Sorry that someone calling out a math error makes the NIST team feel stupid. Instead of dogpiling the person for not stroking their ego, maybe they should correct the error. Last I checked, a quantum computer wasn't needed to handle exponents, a whiteboard will do.
Obviously the standard will be used. As I said in a sibling comment, the US Government fully intends to do this whether the IETF makes a standard or not.
And yes. This has happened. There’s a reason there’s only the NIST P Curves in the WebPKI world.
In this context, it is largely irrelevant whether the IETF chooses or not to have a single-standard draft. There's a code point from IANA to do this in TLS already and it will happen for US Government systems.
I'd also add that personally I consider NIST P-Curves to be absolutely fine crypto. Complete formula exist, so it's possible to have failure-free ops, although point-on-curve needs to be checked. They don't come with the small-order subgroup problem of any Montgomery curve. ECDSA isn't great alone, the hedged variants from RFC 6979 and later drafts should be used.
Since ML-KEM is key exchange, X25519 is very widely used in TLS unless you need to turn it off for FIPS. For the certificate side, the actual WebPKI, I'm going to say RSA wins out (still) (I think).
One other factor which comes in to play, some people can't stand his communication style. When disagreed with, he tends to dig in his heels and write lengthly responses that question people's motives, like in this blog post and others. Accusing the chairs of corruption may have influenced how seriously his complaint was taken.
I don't have context on this other than the linked page, but if what he's saying is accurate, it does seem pretty damning and corrupt, no? Why all the lies and distortions otherwise - how does one assume a generous explanation for lies and distortions?
It's complicated. You'd have to know the rules and read the list archives, and make up your own mind. DJB might be overselling it, so you really do have to check it yourself. I think the WG chair had enough cover to make the call they made. What _I_ would have done is do a WG consensus call on the underlying controversial question once the controversy started, separate from the consensus call on adopting the work item. But I'm not the chair.
The IESG though is completely mishandling it. They could discipline him if need be (posting bans for some amount of time) and still hear the appeal. Instead they're sticking their fingers in their ears. DJB might be childish and annoying, but how are they that much better?
If you alter your official treatment of somebody because they suggested you might be corrupt (in other words, because of personal animus), then you have just confirmed their suggestion.
In this example, rectifying concerns is your job, so yes, you have to do it, even if 1 of the 7 parties who hold the concern is a jerk*. Officials can't dispense with rules and procedure just because their feelings are hurt.
If you are actually corrupt**, it isn't abuse. If you aren't, it still isn't abuse. Even if it is abuse, and you deal with it sanctions, you must still rectify the substance of the concerns upheld by 6 other parties.
* 1/7 would be a pretty desirable jerk/total ratio, in my experience
** (and officially behaving differently based on personal animus makes one so)
22/29 = 76% in some form of "yea"
That feels like "rough consensus"
From https://blog.cr.yp.to/20251004-weakened.html#standards, linked in TFA.
IETF consensus does not require that all participants agree although
this is, of course, preferred. In general, the dominant view of the
working group shall prevail. (However, it must be noted that
"dominance" is not to be determined on the basis of volume or
persistence, but rather a more general sense of agreement.) Consensus
can be determined by a show of hands, humming, or any other means on
which the WG agrees (by rough consensus, of course). Note that 51%
of the working group does not qualify as "rough consensus" and 99% is
better than rough. It is up to the Chair to determine if rough
consensus has been reached.
DJB's argument that this isn't good enough would, by itself, be enough for me to route his objections to /dev/null; it's so tedious and snipey that it sours the quality of his other arguments by mere association. And overall, it gives the impression of someone who is more interested in derailing the entire process than in actually trying to craft a good standard.
DJB provided lengthy, well-reasoned, and well-sourced arguments against adoption with his "nay" vote. The "aye" votes didn't make a meaningful counter-argument - in most cases they didn't even bother to make any argument at all and merely expressed support.
This means there are clearly unresolved technical issues left - and not just the regular bikeshedding ones. If he'd been the only "nay" vote it might've been something which could be ignored as a mad hatter - but he wasn't. Six other people agreed with him.
Considering the potential conflict of interest, the most prudent approach would be to route the unsubstantiated aye-votes to /dev/null: if you can't explain your vote, how can we be sure your vote hasn't been bought?
And then there's a third category of person (really, just one person I think, though). This is responsible for the vast majority of the email traffic on the topic. They're always ready with a detailed point-by-point reply of any replies to their posts. And their argument is... um... they don't like the feature. And they so don't like the feature that they're hanging on to any scintilla of a process argument to make their displeasure derail the entire feature, without really being able to convince anybody else of their dislike (or being able to be convinced to change their mind to any argument).
Now I don't have the cryptographic chops to evaluate DJB's arguments myself. But I also haven't seen any support for his arguments from people I'd trust to be able to evaluate them. And the way he's responding at this point reminds me very much of that third category of people, which is adversely affecting his credibility at this point.
The question at hand is whether the IETF will publish an Informational (i.e., non-standard) document defining pure-MLKEM in TLS or whether people will have to read the Internet-Draft currently associated with the code point.
This makes no sense. If you think it actually had a high chance of remaining unimplemented it anyway then why not just concede the point and take it out? It sure looks like you're not fine with leaving it unimplemented, and you're doing this because you want it implemented, no? It makes no sense to die on that hill if you're gonna tell people it might not exist.
Also, how do you just completely ignore the fact that standards have been weakened in the past precisely to achieve their implementation? This isn't a hypothetical he's worried about, it has literally happened. You're just claiming it's false despite history blatantly showing the opposite because... why? Because trust me bro?
Thankfully cryptography design isn't programming language design, what we have here neither is nor should be a debate or contest over popularity, and the costs of being wrong are enormously different between the two, so you can just sleep easy knowing that your experience doesn't extrapolate to the situation at hand.
If there is any conflation going on, I am not the one doing it.
A consensus isn’t always 100%
See section 3.3 of one of their RFCs for proof.
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2418.html#section-3.3
“ Working groups make decisions through a "rough consensus" process. IETF consensus does not require that all participants agree although this is, of course, preferred. In general, the dominant view of the working group shall prevail. (However, it must be noted that "dominance" is not to be determined on the basis of volume or persistence, but rather a more general sense of agreement.) Consensus can be determined by a show of hands, humming, or any other means on which the WG agrees (by rough consensus, of course). Note that 51% of the working group does not qualify as "rough consensus" and 99% is better than rough. It is up to the Chair to determine if rough consensus has been reached.”
So consensus by your definition is rarely possible given the structure of the organization itself.
This is why there are rough consensus rules, and why there are processes to proceed with dissent. That is also why you have the ability to temporarily ban people, as you would have with pretty much any well-run open forum.
It is also important to note that the goal of IETF is also to create interoperable protocol standards. That means the work in question is a document describing how to apply ML-KEM to TLS in an interoperable way. It is not a discussion of whether ML-KEM is a potentially risky algorithm.
DJB regularly acts like someone who is attempting to sabotage work. It is clear here that they _are_ attempting to prevent a description of how to use ML-KEM with TLS 1.3 from being published. They regularly resort to personal attacks when they don't get their way, and make arguments that are non-technical in nature (e.g. it is NSA sabotage, and chairs are corrupt agents). And this behavior is self-documented in their blog series.
DJB's behavior is why there are rules for how to address dissent. Unfortunately, after decades DJB still does not seem to realize how self-sabotaging this behavior is.
In my experience, the average person treats a standard as an acceptable way of doing things. If ML-KEM is a bad thing to do in general, then there should not be a standard for it (because of the aforementioned treatment by the average person).
> It is clear here that they _are_ attempting to prevent a description of how to use ML-KEM with TLS 1.3 from being published.
It's unclear why trying to prevent a bad practice from being standardized is a bad thing. But wait, how do we know whether it's a good or bad practice? Well, we can examine the response to the concerns DJB raised: Whether the responses satisfactorily addressed the concerns, and whether the responses followed the rules and procedures for resolving each of those concerns.
> They regularly resort to personal attacks when they don't get their way
This is certainly unfortunate, but 6 other parties upheld the concerns. DJB is allowed to be a jerk, even allowed to be banned for abusive behavior IMO, however the concerns he initially raised must nonetheless be satisfactorily addressed, even with him banned. Banning somebody is sometimes necessary, but is not an acceptable means of suppressing valid concerns, especially when those concerns are also held by others who are not banned.
> DJB's behavior is why there are rules for how to address dissent.
The issue here seems to be that the bureaucracy might not be following those rules.
The german position:
https://www.bsi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/EN/BSI/Publicat...
"The quantum-safe mechanisms recommended in this Technical Guideline are generally not yet trusted to the same extent as the established classical mechanisms, since they have not been as well studied with regard to side-channel resistance and implementation security. To ensure the long-term security of a key agreement, this Technical Guideline therefore recommends the use of a hybrid key agreement mechanism that combines a quantum-safe and a classical mechanism."
The french position, also quoting the German position:
https://cyber.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/document/follow_up...
"As outlined in the previous position paper [1], ANSSI still strongly emphasizes the necessity of hybridation1 wherever post-quantum mitigation is needed both in the short and medium term. Indeed, even if the post-quantum algorithms have gained a lot of attention, they are still not mature enough to solely ensure the security"
He has essentially accused anyone who shares this view of secretly working for the NSA. This is ridiculous.
You can see him do this on the mailing list: https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/browse/tls/?q=djb
I think the whole point is that some people would be forced to use it due to other standards picking previously-standardized ciphers. He explains and cites examples of this in the past.
> He has essentially accused anyone who shares this view of secretly working for the NSA. This is ridiculous.
He comes with historical and procedural evidence of bad faith. Why is this ridiculous? If you see half the submitted ciphers being broken, and lies and distortions being used to shove the others through, and historical evidence of the NSA using standards as a means to weaken ciphers, why wouldn't you equate that to working for the NSA (or something equally bad)?
If an organization wants to force its clients or servers to use pure ML-KEM, they can already do this using any means they like. The standardization of a TLS ciphersuite is besides the point.
> He comes with historical and procedural evidence of bad faith. Why is this ridiculous?
Yes, the NSA has nefariously influenced standards processes. That does not mean that in each and every standards process (especially the ones that don't go your way) you can accuse everyone who disagrees with you, on the merits, of having some ulterior motive or secret relationship with the NSA. That is exactly what he has done repeatedly, both on his blog and on the list.
> why wouldn't you equate that to working for the NSA (or something equally bad)?
For the simple reason that you should not accuse another person of working for the NSA without real proof of that! The standard of proof for an accusation like that cannot be "you disagree with me".
How is that the standard he's applying, though? Just reading his post, it's clearly "you're blatantly and repeatedly lying, and distorting the facts, and not even addressing my arguments". Surely "you disagree with me" is not an accurate characterization of this?
Given that starting point, you believe that anything other than complete capitulation to DJB is going to be rejected. How are you supposed to negotiate with DJB? Should you try?
Any personal insults one of the parties lobs at others can be addressed separately from the concerns. An official must perform their duties without bias, even concerning somebody who thinks them the worst person in the world, and makes it known.
tl;dr: sometimes the rude, loud, angry constituent at the town hall meeting is right
Someone who wants to be seen as acting in good faith (and cryptography standards folks should want this), should be addressing the substance of what he said.
Consensus doesn't mean "majority rule", it requires good-faith resolutions (read: not merely responses like 'nuh-uh') to the voiced concerns.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32360533
From 2023, "Debunking NIST's calculation of the Kyber-512 security level":
Stuff like this
> Wow, look at that: "due process".... Could it possibly be that the people writing the law were thinking through how standardization processes could be abused?"
is both accusing the other party of bad faith and also heavily using sarcasm, which is a sort of performative bad faith.
Sarcasm can be really effective when used well. But when a post is dripping with sarcasm and accusing others of bad faith it comes off as hiding a weak position behind contempt. I don't know if this is just how DJB writes, or if he's adopting this voice because he thinks it's what the internet wants to see right now.
Personally, I would prefer a style where he says only what he means without irony and expresses his feelings directly. If showing contempt is essential to the piece, then the Linus Torvalds style of explicit theatrical contempt is probably preferable, at least to me.
I understand others may feel differently. The style just gives me crackpot vibes and that may color reception of the blog posts to people who don't know DJT's reputation.
ECC is well understood and has not been broken over many years.
ML-KEM is new, and hasn't had the same scrutiny as ECC. It's possible that the NSA already knows how to break this, and has chosen not to tell us, and NIST plays the useful idiot.
NIST has played the useful idiot before, when it promoted Dual_EC_DRBG, and the US government paid RSA to make it the default CSPRNG in their crypto libraries for everyone else... but eventually word got out that it's almost certainly an NSA NOBUS special, and everyone started disabling it.
Knowing all that, and planning for a future where quantum computers might defeat ECC -- it's not defeated yet, and nobody knows when in the future that might happen... would you choose:
Option A): encrypt key exchange with ECC and the new unproven algorithm
Option B): throw out ECC and just use the new unproven algorithm
NIST tells you option B is for the best. NIST told you to use Dual_EC_DRBG. W3C adopted EME at the behest of Microsoft, Google and Netflix. Microsoft told you OOXML is a valid international standard you should use instead of OpenDocument (and it just so happens that only one piece of software, made by Microsoft, correctly reads and writes OOXML). So it goes on. Standards organisations are very easily corruptable when its members are allowed to have conflicts of interest and politick and rules-lawyer the organisation into adopting their pet standards.
FWIW, in my experience on standardization committees, the worst example I've seen of rules-lawyering to drive standards changes is... what DJB's doing right now. There's a couple of other egregious examples I can think of, where people advocating against controversial features go in full rules-lawyer mode to (unsuccessfully) get the feature pulled. I've never actually seen any controversial feature make it into a standard because of rules-lawyering.
As an outsider I'd understand it differently: reading rules and pointing out their lack of violation (perhaps in letter), when people feel like you violated it (perhaps in spirit), is what would be rules-lawyering. You're agreeing on what the written rules are, but interpreting actions as following vs. violating them.
That's quite different from an accusation of rules violation followed by silence or distortions or outright lies.
If someone is pointing out that you're violating the rules and you're lying or staying silent or distorting the facts, you simply don't get to dismiss or smear them with a label like "rules-lawyer". For rules to be followed, people have to be able to enforce them. Otherwise it's just theater.
So yeah, NSA potentially sneaking a backdoor into an approved standard is pretty outrageous, and worth objecting to in strongest terms, and when that risk is present it should be subjected to the highest conceiveable standard of scrutiny.
In fact, I found this to be the strongest point in the article - there's any number of alternatives that might (1) prove easier to implement, (2) prove more resilient to future attacks (3) turn out to be the most efficient.
Just because you want to do something in the future doesn't mean it needs to be ML-KEM specifically, and the idea of throwing out ECC is almost completely inexplicable unless you're the NSA and you can't break it and you're trying to propose a new standard that doesn't include it.
How is that not a hair on fire level concern?
What I don't understand is why -- assuming he thinks this is important -- he's chosen to write the bits about the standardization process in a way that predisposes readers against his case?
He's caustic, but often right.
However, he’s left a wake of combative controversy his entire career, of the “crackpot” type the parent comment notes, and at some point it’d be worth his asking, AITA? Second, his unconditional support of Jacob Appelbaum has been bonkers. He’s obviously smart and uncompromising but, despite having been in the right on some issues, his scorched earth approach/lack of judgment seems to have turned his paranoia about everyone being out to get him into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Please ELI5: what is the argument for including the option for the non-hybrid option in this standard? Is it a good argument in your expert opinion?
My pea brain: implementers plus options equals bad, newfangled minus entrenched equals bad, alice only trust option 1 but bob only have option 2 = my pea brain hurt!
This ( https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-tls-mlkem/ ) is a document describing how to use the ML-KEM algorithm with TLS 1.3 in an interoperable manner.
It does not preclude other post-quantum algorithms from being described for use with TLS 1.3. It also does not preclude hybrid approaches from being used with TLS 1.3.
It is however a document scoped so it cannot be expanded to include either of those things. Work to define interoperable use of other algorithms, including hybrid algorithms, would be in other documents.
There is no MTI (mandatory-to-implement) once these are documented from the IETF directly, but there could be market and regulatory pressures.
My suspicion is that this is bleed-out from a larger (and uglier) fight in the sister organization, the IRTF. There, the crypto forum research group (CFRG) has been having discussions on KEMs which have gotten significantly more heated.
A person with concern that there may be weaknesses in a post quantum technique may want a hybrid option to provide additional security. They may then be concerned that standardization of non-hybrid options would discourage hybrid usage, where hybrid is not yet standardized and would likely be standardized later (or not at all).
The pressure now with post quantum is to create key negotiation algorithms are not vulnerable to theoretical post quantum computer attack. This is because of the risk of potentially valuable encrypted traffic being logged now in the hopes that it could later be targeted by a post-quantum computer.
Non-negotiated encrypted (e.g. just using a static AES key) is already safe, and signature algorithms can be updated much closer to viable attacks to protect transactional data.
FYI, the specification for hybrid MLKEM + ECC is ahead of this document in the publication process. https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-tls-ecdhe-mlkem/
This /. story fills in the backstory: https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/11/23/226258/cryptologist-d...
Normal practice in deploying post-quantum cryptography is to deploy ECC+PQ. IETF's TLS working group is standardizing ECC+PQ. But IETF management is also non-consensually ramming a particular NSA-driven document through the IETF process, a "non-hybrid" document that adds just PQ as another TLS option.It is not acceptable for the government to be forcing bad crypto down our throats, it is not acceptable for the NSA to be poisoning the well this way, but for all I respect DJB, they are "playing the game" and 20 to 7 is consensus.
The informal also didn’t cloak their identity (implies some malicious intent), they simple did not use their work email. Nothing wrong with that.
Deliberate personal breaches of privacy against HN members as a response to the contents of their speech like this stifle free discourse to the highest degree possible and should be banned or at least harshly admonished, no?
Saying that it is a "breach of privacy" when the relevant details are being advertised by the person in question is silly.
This is a list made by you 2 weeks ago?
EDIT: Okay lol. I actually browsed the list and found multiple dubious entries, along with Trump!
Hilarious list. 10/10.
Honestly, it's a bit sad. There are many great people on that list, but some seem a bit random and some are just straight up cryptobros, which makes the whole thing a joke, unfortunately
You can read up more here if you are curious: https://www.statewatch.org/media/documents/news/2015/jun/beh...
Many of the attacks against djb line up quite nicely with "discredit" operational objectives.
Are the strategies you mention actually in the document? It seems like one particularly focused on very soft tactics.