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Comment by FiloSottile | Hacker News Reader

Thus succeeding at making the telecommunications vendors used for Top Secret US national security data less secure, the obvious goal of the US National Security Agency, and the only reason they wouldn't use the better cryptography designed by Dr. Bernstein. /s

Truly, truly can't understand why anyone finds this line of reasoning plausible. (Before anyone yells Dual_EC_DRBG, that was a NOBUS backdoor, which is an argument against the NSA promoting mathematically broken cryptography, if anything.)

Timing side channels don't matter to ephemeral ML-KEM key exchanges, by the way. It's really hard to implement ML-KEM wrong. It's way easier to implement ECDH wrong, and remember that in this hypothetical you need to compare to P-256, not X25519, because US regulation compliance is the premise.

(I also think these days P-256 is fine, but that is a different argument.)

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I genuinely do not understand how someone working in the capacity that you do, for things that matter universally for people, can contend that an organization who is intentionally engaging in NOBUS backdoors can be remotely trusted at all.

That is insanely irresponsible and genuinely concerning. I don't care if they have a magical ring that defies all laws of physics and assuredly prevents any adversary stealing the backdoor. If an organization is implementing _ANY_ backdoor, they are an adversary from a security perspective and their guidance should be treated as such.

The world just doesn’t work in such a binary way. Forming a mental model of an entity’s incentives, goals, capabilities, and dysfunctions will serve you much better than making two buckets for trusted parties and adversaries.

As you are someone building cryptographic libraries used by people all over the world, which includes those who might be seen as "enemies" by the organization in question, this is not a gradient — it's quite binary in nature.

Maybe your motives are benevolent, but you're arguing two things:

1) We can broadly trust the US government 2) We should adopt new encryption partly designed and funded by the US government, and get rid of the battle tested encryption that they seem not to be able to break

Forgive me for being somewhat suspicious of your motives here

[We can broadly trust the US government] not to promote broken encryption to its own agencies.

> Thus succeeding at making the telecommunications vendors used for Top Secret US national security data less secure, the obvious goal of the US National Security Agency

NSA still has the secret Suite A system for their most sensitive information. If they think that is better than the current public algorithms and their goal is to make telecommunications vendors to have better encryption, then why doesn't they publish those so telco could use it?

> Truly, truly can't understand why anyone finds this line of reasoning plausible. (Before anyone yells Dual_EC_DRBG, that was a NOBUS backdoor, which is an argument against the NSA promoting mathematically broken cryptography, if anything.)

The NSA weakened DES against brute-force attack by reducing the key size (while making it stronger against differential cryptanalysis, though).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard#NSA's...

Also NSA put a broken cipher in the Clipper Chip (beside all the other vulnerabilities).

The thing that sets this effort apart from DES and Clipper is that USG actually has skin in the game. Neither DES or Clipper were ever intended or approved to protect classified information.

These are algorithms that NSA will use in real systems to protect information up to the TOP SECRET codeword level through programs such as CNSA 2.0[1] and CsFC.

[1] https://media.defense.gov/2025/May/30/2003728741/-1/-1/0/CSA...

[2] https://www.nsa.gov/Resources/Commercial-Solutions-for-Class...

> Thus succeeding at making the telecommunications vendors used for Top Secret US national security data less secure, the obvious goal of the US National Security Agency, and the only reason they wouldn't use the better cryptography designed by Dr. Bernstein. /s

I guess the NSA thinks they're the only one that can target such a side channel, unlike, say, a foreign government, which doesn't have access to the US Internet backbone, doesn't have as good mathematicians or programmers (in NSA opinion), etc.

> Timing side channels don't matter to ephemeral ML-KEM key exchanges, by the way. It's really hard to implement ML-KEM wrong. It's way easier to implement ECDH wrong, and remember that in this hypothetical you need to compare to P-256, not X25519, because US regulation compliance is the premise.

Except for KyberSlash (I was surprised when I looked at the bug's code, it's written very optimistically wrt what the compiler would produce...)

So do you think vendors will write good code within the deadlines between now and... 2029? I wouldn't bet my state secrets on that...

> KyberSlash

That's a timing side-channel, irrelevant to ephemeral key exchanges, and tbh if that's the worst that went wrong in a year and a half, I am very hopeful indeed.

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