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Comment by rmrfstar | Hacker News Reader

"Sovereignty" is an important concept that dropped out of American discourse in the 1990s. No self-respecting country relies on foreign cryptography to protect its diplomatic communications.

Similarly, no self-respecting country in 2030 will rely entirely on foreign integrated circuits. FPGAs will play an important role for small countries, but large groups like EU can afford to go big.

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Sovereignty matters when you can’t trust there won’t be supply disruptions due to war, piracy, or trade intervention.

Post ww2 the US had no reason to be concerned with any of the above in the western world, following the collapse of the USSR this mentality was extended globally with the belief that “we’d reached the end of history”.

As of 2020 I don’t think any major power considers the risk of trade interventions or war to be negligible. The us navy may no longer be capable of ensuring freedom of the seas unilaterally.

An alternative explanation is that US policy makers like Larry Summers and Bob Rubin are just incompetent, delusional, and greedy.

> No self-respecting country relies on foreign cryptography to protect its diplomatic communications.

I am fairly certain most of the western world relies on a Belgian cipher called Rijndael to encrypt all/the majority of its diplomatic communications.

I'm not really sure what you mean by this comment.

There is a lot more to a communication system than the primitives it uses. Even holding primitives constant, there is a lot of room for variation (and bugs and side channels). Recall that one of the early identifiers of equation group was subtracting 0x61C88647 rather than adding 0x9E3779B9 during RC6 key setup [1 p. 28]. So I guess what I'm saying is nations don't just download AES bitstreams off the internet.

[1] https://media.kasperskycontenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/sit...

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