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NIST is an untrustworthy government agency that occasionally produces useful encryption standards. The answer to "should we use a NIST standard" is to look at what the wider academic cryptography community is talking about. Dual_EC_DRBG was complained about immediately (for various strange statistical properties that made it impractical) and people found the ability to hide a backdoor in Dual_EC_DRBG in 2004.
If anything, the biggest issue is that the security experts pointing out the obvious and glaring flaws with NIST standards don't get listened to enough.
[0] A random number generator standard designed specifically with a back door that only the creator of its curve constants could make use of or even prove had been inserted. It was pushed by NIST during the Bush Jr. administration.
> In September 2013, both The Guardian and The New York Times reported that NIST allowed the National Security Agency (NSA) to insert a cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator called Dual EC DRBG into NIST standard SP 800-90 that had a kleptographic backdoor that the NSA can use to covertly predict the future outputs of this pseudorandom number generator. [...] the NSA worked covertly to get its own version of SP 800-90 approved for worldwide use in 2006. The whistle-blowing document states that "eventually, NSA became the sole editor".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institute_of_Standard...
1. Pretend to be someone else and enter a backdoored algorithm. Or pressure someone to enter a backdoored algorithm for you. Or just give them the algorithm for the reward of being the winner.
2. Be NIST, and choose that algorithm.
This is the problem with all these modern NIST contest theories. They're not even movie plots. Your last bit, about them paying someone like Peikert off, isn't even coherent; they could do that with or without the contest.
Then why does the contest give you any more confidence that the selection isn't backdoored?
People on threads like these are pretending NIST was a shadowy force making secret determinations, but the whole thing happens in the open, and NIST is essentially just proctoring.
A lot of this kind of thing is just people telling on themselves that they don't follow the field and don't trust any cryptography not done by one of the three cryptographers they've ever heard of.
>NIST is essentially just proctoring
Well, there we go. These items are actually good information (to be verified of course). Way better information than questions that seem to miss the concern. Thank you.
In NIST's position one could analyze the submissions for vulnerabilities to closely held (non-public) attacks, then select submissions having those vulnerabilities.
it's only the next natural step
I’d be more concerned with whether NIST colludes with the NSA to approve algorithms they could crack.
It's more than a concern that the US government will select algorithms that their top spook agency can crack. One must assume it is the case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG
It's not at all impossible to put a backdoor in a protocol which requires knowledge of a key in order to exploit. This isn't even the only example where this is thought to have occured.
If you introduce a deliberate weakness to your encryption, the overall security is reduced to the security level of that weakness.
Relying on NOBUS ("nobody but us") is hubris (see shadow brokers, snowden, etc.).
There's no reason to think it would have remained a "NOBUS" backdoor forever. Especially if it was more widely used (i.e. higher value), and/or used for longer.
>Using this logic, you would say that no encryption method is possibly secure
I mean, to an extent that a little waterboarding will beat any encryption method, yes I would say that.
But, for 99.99% of people, your data isn't worth the waterboarding. On the flipside, a backdoor to, say, all TLS communication, would be very worth waterboarding people.
I wonder what other countries do? Do their agencies trust NIST or they recommend their own and run their programs for algorithms. I am thinking of say Germany, France, Britain etc.
https://www.bsi.bund.de/EN/Themen/Unternehmen-und-Organisati...
https://cyber.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/document/pqc-trans...
https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/whitepaper/next-steps-preparing-for-...
> The NCSC recommends ML-KEM-768 and ML-DSA-65 as providing appropriate levels of security and efficiency for most use cases.
e: and yes, i am aware of the history around nist and crypto
That's the thing about politics... they touch everything. There's a popular youtuber that I like, he's got a funny saying "You might not fuck with politics, but politics will fuck with you!" Fits well here.
You might wanna ignore politics when talking about something that should be pure math, but now that we're talking about why crypto is going to be the standards that all commercial software must support. Suddenly we now need to consider how confident we are in something. And really, that's all crypto boils down to is confidence in the difficulty of some maths. Was this recommended (soon mandated) with more or less care then the other options? How would we be able to tell. Is NIST likely to remake their previous unethical mistakes?
No. They don't. The level at which politics has actually intersected with my life in the past year is zero. I suspect the same is true for the majority of people in the US.
Your politics are mostly a fashion choice. You don't need to put them on display in literally ever conversation. You also cannot possibly change the world around you with this behavior so I can't understand why so many people feel the need to engage in it.
> Suddenly we now need to consider
The government is massive. You always need to consider this. Pretending that a choice of a single federal official is the difference maker here takes bizarre fashion choices into the completely absurd. The only thing you're doing is alienating half the audience with churlish behavior.
Road maintenance, sewer connections, water and air quality, food safety, and a million other things that you interact with daily are all results of various levels of politics.
Given your obvious disgust with someone else thinking or talking about it. (You weren't tagged, you decided to invite yourself into the conversation to proclaim that someone else is wrong for understanding the world differently from you) It's not much of a shock you can't understand why.
> you also cannot possibly change the world around you with this behavior
This feels like the thing you're actually mad about. Complaining at other people for talking about politics (instead of ignoring them) will have even less of an effect. If you want to have an impact ask more questions, don't berate people for not being as smart as you already are, or for daring to see things differently from the way you see them.
As for the change in the world I want to see. First, I want people to be nicer to each other. This us vs them thing needs to stop. Second, I don't need to change the world, I'm happy to just improve my little corner of it a bit. Security (and crypto) is my corner; and NIST has made some mistakes that I find problematic. The idea that leadership of any org *does* influence an org, isn't normally controversial, so if the leadership changes. It's good to know the trust level is gonna change. If the leadership changes in a less trustworthy direction. I'd hope more people learn about it, so blind trust in NIST drops. I would call that a small improvement.
> The government is massive. You always need to consider this. Pretending that a choice of a single federal official is the difference maker here takes bizarre fashion choices into the completely absurd. The only thing you're doing is alienating half the audience with churlish behavior.
I mean, the people replying to you while you rage at them must care a bit about the politics of the system. So I can't imagine that calling something they care about a "fashion choice", and then insulting them wouldn't feel alienating. Is this a do as I say, not as I do kinda thing?
That's not the argument being made, you're using that as a strawman to distract from the actual position, which is that indiscriminate layoffs (which is what DOGE is doing) reduce institutional competence and increase the likelihood that whatever scheme is selected is not fit for purpose. Address that argument, not the one you've invented in your head.
> reduce institutional competence and increase the likelihood
most replies interpreted it the same way I did, likely due to the reference to 'loyalties' & 'trust'.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43333834 [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43333698 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43333643