> Unfortunately, we can't yet say that about lattice cryptography, despite it being approximately as well-studied as ECC.
> Unfortunately, we can't yet say that about lattice cryptography, despite it being approximately as well-studied as ECC.
having said that, I would trust McEliece more than Kyber.
The real problem I have is best described as I haven't read a single coherent argument responding to and rejecting the real concerns raised by the individual who after nist betrayed the internet with by recommending a compromised standard at the encouragement of the NSA. Is the person who wrote the crypto library everyone uses.
DJB puts his money (time) where his mouth is. I would critique his attachment to his own ego. But I'm in the group of people who haven't contributed enough yet to foss to get to throw stones. So I'll defer to people who can match his contributions. Until that happens, DJB's reputation is cares passionately about crypto and it's community, vs an US government group with a reputation for trying to sabotage crypto systems after passing secrets with the NSA, who refuses to provide details about their most recent secret messages.
I do find some of the arguments and refutations from the mailing lists compelling. But not all the them, and nothing directly from NIST. Equally some of DJB's appear to weaken his points. But like I said, I plan to trust the reputation each party has earned.
NIST has a history of behaving inappropriately, and unethically around it's cryptography recommendations. But the people currently in charge would rather pretend they're above it and not literally directly responsible for the organization with a well earned reputation. If you're given a 2nd chance after your partner catches you cheating, it's a reasonable requirement that you account for every second of your time, until you restore the reputation you destroyed.
NIST isn't the NSA and doesn't have the NSA's goals in mind. They are briefed by NSA on some matters, sure, but they're not the same organization.
NSA has a dual mission: Both SIGINT and COMINT. While the SIGINT folks might rub their hands and laugh evilly at the prospect of backdooring the PQ KEM that the Internet wants to move towards, this plot makes no sense at several levels.
The NSA has, through CNSA 2.0, committed to moving the entire federal government onto ML-KEM for top secret communications. The COMINT guys would shit themselves in rage if it turned out to be backdoored, even if there was enough hubris that the backdoor was NOBUS.
If you can't trust the people, you should always seek to understand their incentives if you want to predict their behavior.
My interpretation of the CNSA 2.0 move was that the NSA believes 1) that ML-KEM is actually the good stuff, and 2) the Suite B transition failed so spectacularly that they want to signal confidence in ML-KEM by recommending it without hybridization. Since pretty much everything they do is top secret, they probably can't comment further.
Incentives are basically all I consider when trying to establish true motive. But you're not required to consider motive when there's a history or pattern. Even if "It's the way we've always done it", wasn't a much, much stronger motive than thought/reason is for any human. It's both logical and desired to treat something as the most dangerous until proven otherwise.
I used to be a nurse. I remember when working in the ED, I was taught that every single woman on childbearing age who comes into the ED with abdominal pain is an extopic pregnancy until proven otherwise. If you ask a woman if it's possible she could be pregnant, regardless of the truth, many will claim it's impossible. If you blindly trust them, and delay treatment, you could needlessly kill your patient, or leave them infertile. Why would someone lie and risk that? Or how dare your medical team make assumptions like that? Well the alternative is worse, the reality should be easy to prove.
NIST has a history of recommending broken ciphers. That's not a mistake a professional would ever make. So thinking about incentives, I'm going to treat it like it was intentional. Here the group with a history for fucking up, isn't being transparent. I would love it if NIST would say enough to make DJB happy or at least stop pretending like they deserve any trust anymore.
Until then, I don't find "they're probably behaving like rational actors" compelling enough to trust them with keeping secrets from somebody who I actually do trust.
Incorrect. My argument is that they aren't the same entity.
The thing you said is a whole different argument. "I like waffles" "So you hate pancakes" is happening.
> Incentives are basically all I consider when trying to establish true motive. But you're not required to consider motive when there's a history or pattern.
Yes you are. You need to consider both factors. Why render yourself willfully ignorant? That's not how you arrive at truth.
Your mind is going to be blown when you learn about proxy organizations and cut-outs.
Would you indict NIST MEP https://www.nist.gov/mep/about-nist-mep as being an NSA project without evidence?
That's beyond moving goalposts. Just take the L, dude.
Just because NIST engages in some wholesome activities doesn’t mean that their core purpose isn’t to do the bidding of the NSA.
Their core purpose is to recommend standards that everyone can use, and anyone who wants to work with the US government is expected to follow. They have to pick standards for everything, but can't have experts in everything on staff, so are required to defer to other experts willing to help. The NSA took advantage of them. I find the idea that NIST wants to be a lackey to the NSA, stupid. It's ignorance and incompetence that lead NIST to getting duped by the NSA. The problem is, not getting dupe is literally, their *only* job.
It's like hiring a firefighter to protect you and then they set your house on fire; it doesn't matter so much why you don't have a house anymore... you just sure a hell are never letting him near anything important every again.
You're allowed to treat gross incompetence as equivalent to intentional malice, without needing to make something up about how it was intentional.
Did I claim they were the same?
> The thing you said is a whole different argument. "I like waffles" "So you hate pancakes" is happening.
uh.... you started it? What are we even doing? I'm not above this kinda comment, but I kinda assumed you were? I'd be interested if you have a take I haven't considered; but not if we're just going to try to make straw man of the other.
> Yes you are. [required to consider motive]. Why render yourself willfully ignorant? That's not how you arrive at truth.
I'm not looking for a pure truth. I'm just looking for a heuristic that's just functional enough to keep me, and my data safe. I don't even want to make a perfect is the enemy of good argument. I'm just pointing out, where my line is. I lack the maths knowledge, practical experience, fucks left to give, and spoons remaining for the things I want to spend my time one. Evaluating every bit of information I could possibly gather, and witholding and judgement is a cute idea, but I've got better things to do. NIST has in tandem with the NSA, lied, and shipped a broken crypto system. Let's pretend I don't consider that to be permanently disqualifying, resign, stand up a completely new group from scratch, black tag/non-salvageable. They've burned the default good will everyone starts with, and then peed on it for good measure. Now they're hiding information AGAIN?!
Nah, I could waste my time trying to find the objective truth. Or I could give NIST the finger, and say, make the person with the remaining good will and trust and fucks left to spend on NIST happy. Only then come back to me. Until then, I refuse, and for the same reason I refuse to review LLM PRs; I'm trying to do things, and [they] are trying to DoS my brain.
Ideally, you'd stop helping [the them], or answer the remaining objections line by line, and publicly? Then I'd have someone else with enough good will that I can trust. Because NIST is doing the opposite if they want my confidence.
"Weaknesses in the cryptographic security of the algorithm were known and publicly criticised well before the algorithm became part of a formal standard endorsed by the ANSI, ISO, and formerly by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). One of the weaknesses publicly identified was the potential of the algorithm to harbour a cryptographic backdoor advantageous to those who know about it—the United States government's National Security Agency (NSA)—and no one else. In 2013, The New York Times reported that documents in their possession but never released to the public "appear to confirm" that the backdoor was real, and had been deliberately inserted by the NSA as part of its Bullrun decryption program."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG
"NSA worked closely with IBM to strengthen the algorithm against all except brute-force attacks and to strengthen substitution tables, called S-boxes. Conversely, NSA tried to convince IBM to reduce the length of the key from 64 to 48 bits. Ultimately they compromised on a 56-bit key"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Encryption_Standard
The NSA published algorithms are not used for the important US secrets. For these system the classified algorithms of NSA Suite A are used.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_Suite_A_Cryptography
NSA Suite A was probably used for Space Shuttle comunication. NASA scrambled to recover classified communications gear after the Challenger shuttle disaster in 1986.
https://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2003/030206-comsec-s...
They made DES more secure against differential cryptanalysis (a method that was classified at the time DES was being designed). Sure, the whole "make the keys 56-bit instead of 64-bit" is a weakening, but differential cryptanalysis would have broken the entire fucking cipher if they didn't prevent it by selecting a secure S-box.
> The NSA pushed backdoored design of Dual_EC_DRBG was standardized in NIST SP 800-90A.
Correct, which another threat actor used in a backdoor by replacing the public key.
I'm not arguing that NIST isn't vulnerable to NSA influence. I'm arguing that they are not the same entity and do not have the same goals or incentives.
I'm not an NSA defender. https://furry.engineer/@soatok/116854899284071513
"
Michael Hayden, a former NSA Director, has since acknowledged the concept of NOBUS:
You look at a vulnerability through a different lens if even with the vulnerability it requires substantial computational power or substantial other attributes and you have to make the judgment who else can do this? If there's a vulnerability here that weakens encryption but you still need four acres of Cray computers in the basement in order to work it you kind of think "NOBUS" and that's a vulnerability we are not ethically or legally compelled to try to patch – it's one that ethically and legally we could try to exploit in order to keep Americans safe from others."
In general we can asume that NOBUS applies to everything NSA publishes or supports. If not in direct algorithmic weakness, then in weakened parameters or in selection of algorithms that are hard to implement in secure way without specialized hardware support (side channel attacks of AES, sensitivity of DSA to quality of random number generator, hard to correctly implement NIST curves - generated by NSA).
The controversy over the PQC is the topic at hand. If they'd selected a cipher that didn't carry the objections of someone who's reputation I trust more than NIST. Then I'd trust NIST's decision, by proxy.
That's what's so crazymaking about this. People who actually pay attention to cryptography know all this, so much so that Bernstein sounds deranged to many of them. But he's counting on you not knowing any of it. Which is to say: he's preying on your ignorance. It's a bad scene.
I know all of that, I also know I'm years away from the maths to understand the crypto and decide for myself. So, I'm forced to have an opinion because friends and employers will expect me to have one; like them, I'm also forced to operate on trust. Help me with this one? Because my problem is, the only person in the whole scene with ethos is djb. Not a single person in the stack has their name on *anything* that would allow me to trust them given their previous behavior.
So who's the non-deranged person that can put their ego aside, long enough to go point by point down the "deranged man"'s "psychotic rant". Where something everyone who's paying attention can point to and say, djb has stopped taking his crazy pills, here's what reality looks like. Because I went looking for it when I first heard about it, his blog has been linked to from HN many times. But no one has linked to a single other person. I agree with you, the arguments he's making are barely convincing. But one one side, I have a well respected cryptographer (who might want to consider or respond to the accusations he's becoming a bit eccentric) saying hey, y'all are fucking it up. Directly to the people who actively did something ethically inexcusable. Who not only appear to following the exact same pattern as last time, but no one is willing to put their name and time on the line?
What am I supposed to do? Get on board because NIST recommended it already, and there's the RFC for it, so why bother fighting? Just trust the current or next US administration won't do something I object to... like trying to back door crypto... again... I know you'd never actually make that recommendation... well I hope at least. But really; what would you expect me, someone who still trust djb even though his eccentric writing is desperate for an editor, and also, someone who actively believes the people in charge of NIST are ethically questionable. What should I do? where's the evidence that would convince me to switch from believing the guy working to improve foss crypto, to the org with a history of delivering backdoor'd crypto.
The problem here is that literally the only information you have to work with is Daniel Bernstein, a notorious standards crank. The names of the cryptographers vouching for Kyber don't mean anything to you. Peter Schwabe? Leo Ducas? Chris Peikert? You're not a cryptographer, who could reasonably expect you to know who those people are?
And Bernstein knows it, and plays it to the hilt.
But I already pointed this out. You keep bringing it back to NIST, but I keep telling you: if you simply let a panel of PQC contestants with credible affiliations vote on it, you'd have gotten the same outcome. So we're really just going around in circles here.
I'm not taken in by the crazyness on either side, and while if pressed, it's obvious which side I would pick. I'm not so much picking a side, so much as complaining again, how we're letting a group with an earned reputation for being untrustworthy keep secrets about crypto. I hate the whole thing, but that's how little trust I have left in other people. The crazy guy is the on the side I hate less... but what to do?
edit:
> You're making my point for me. Nobody in the whole world is asking for you to take NIST's word for anything.
Literally everyone standardizing on Kyber is asking me to trust NIST, et al, and pay the additional overhead for setting up a TLS connection. I guess you could frame it as they're not asking, because I'm not being physically forced to interact with them... but then I try really hard not to engage with bad faith bait, when I'm able to resist.
> you don't have to trust the server
oh, sorry I should have realized this wasn't a conversation anymore
Good luck buddy :)
If DJB blindly distrusts the NSA, he would also recommend against SHA2. But he doesn't, and instead wants to mix a scheme developed by European academics with one built by the NSA. If you go by blind distrust, this should be extremely concerning.
Of course, I'm not suggesting you use blind distrust, and only pointing out that none of the blind distrust discourse makes any sense. We all trust SHA2, which was an explicit NSA product. Kyber had no NSA input. why is Kyber the NSA-suspect scheme?
https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/1232
This doesn't hit classic McEliece yet, but is part of a line of work that Randriambololona has been doing, which are at a minimum very concerning for the security of McEliece.
for applications where key exchange need not be particularly fast or compact, I would even throw in 4096 MP-RSA in (tuned to whatever size the exchange can tolerate) as a hedge against that if a CRQC is even possible, it would be able to continue to grow in size quickly or at all.
This isn't to say that it is impossible for the NSA to have their own private cryptanalysis. It is to say they're not some magical fairy that produces non-trivial attacks. They, like any other organization, need to develop talent. In the past they have been able to do this (they, through the CCR, hired Don Coppersmith in 2005. A VERY notable cryptanalyst at the time). I am unaware of any lattice cryptanalysts who have "gone dark" in a way similar to how Coppersmith did in ~2005.
Note that we also have theoretical reasons to be more confident in the hardness of ML-KEM. The reasons are technical (and worse than the practical reasons we have, namely people have iterated on attacks and the attacks stopped getting appreciably better). But it is (curiously) the hardness assumption we perhaps have the best (theoretical) justification for why it is hard.
Using RSA as a hedge would be incredibly stupid. Index calculus attacks were significantly improved in the 2010s, at least for small characteristic finite field DH. These improvements have only tangentially hit RSA. I've heard a integer factorization record holder directly say there's no real barrier to similar improvements hitting factoring. It hasn't been done, so it isn't "easy". But also people wouldn't be surprised if it was done. The record for binary characteristic finite field DH is ~30k bits (by an academic team. governments could throw more money at it of course).
https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/1339
Note that this is by someone from the BSI. It's worth mentioning the BSI is very familiar with lattice-based schemes (they recommend using FrodoKEM rather than Kyber, but whatever). Despite this familiarity, the attacks they are able to publish aren't regarding lattice-based schemes, and instead a different scheme Bernstein was affiliated with.
NTRU-derivatives and McEliece derivatives are (objectively speaking) not a good track record to have, PQC-wise.
Like for any other cryptographic algorithms, where one or more decades were necessary for a good understanding of their properties, we can expect much more relevant publications about lattice key establishment in the next years, than until now.
https://security.googleblog.com/2016/07/experimenting-with-p...
one or more decades were required to get good understanding of the relevant lattice problems. But they were introduced in
* the ~1990s, for NTRU, and * ~2005, for LWE, and * ~2012, for RWLE
ironically, of all of them LWE is probably understood the best (though our understanding of LWE, RLWE, and MLWE are all roughly similar now). This is because it is a problem more amenable to understanding than NTRU, which is (by comparison) a little more "ad hoc".
For lattice-based KEMs, we also have very strong understanding of things. Roughly, we were able to design the lattice-based KEMs based on our prior understanding of general KEMs. Concretely, we had a much better understanding of the precise details of the FO transform, which fed into teh design of lattice-based KEMs. So most lattice-based KEMs solely had to construct a lattice-based PKE. Doing so from LWE is fairly straightforward. Iirc since ~2005 there was a certain technique known, and then a more optimized technique was developed in ~2011. All lattice-based KEMs (that construct IND-CPA PKE -> FO Transform -> IND-CCA2 PKE) proceed with this ~2011 technique, with various internal knobs tweaked.
Post-standardization there has been some additional research into lattice-based KEMs, but they have (generally) been proceeding by tweaking the core ~2005 hardness assumption to try to get more efficiency. It's an interesting idea, but generally hardness assumptions take the longest time to gain confidence out of any part of a cryptographic algorithm (as they're the only unprovable part), so it might be a bit before we feel "safe" regarding them.
DJB is not just a mathematician looking over theoretical equations. He's also an expert in the real world _implementation_ of cryptography where most security failures can be expected to occur.
For some mathematician's brilliant cryptography scheme, how easy would it be for implementers to develop constant time / constant power computer algorithms to avoid side channel leakage? Have these computer algorithms been developed, are they easy to implement securely or are implementers going to continually mess it up?
See [1] and [2] for answers. Summary: Technology is not ready.
That said, personally speaking, his behavior as a software publisher (packaging & whatnot) is something I'd call… let's go with "subpar" and leave it at that. So while I do believe it's a fair argument, I'm not accepting it, because from my perspective he isn't putting in the necessary work to really understand software publishing.
One very big problem I have with Bernstein's recent activism is the way he writes to an audience you can just very clearly tell he thinks little of. He's assuming everybody who pays attention to this stuff has paid basically no attention at all to any cryptography he himself didn't write about. It's a bad argument, but that's not my big issue; my big issue is that he's making fools of his supporters. Not OK.
He has published a very large quantity of open-source software, but after publication he never bothered with any kind of maintenance, which is understandable, because he went on doing other work.
On the other hand, unlike almost any other software packages, those published by him almost did not need any maintenance. The only required changes, after decades since they were written, have been caused by external changes, e.g. the continuous evolution and instability of the Linux APIs and the replacement of various IETF RFCs.
I am still using several software packages written by DJB, which have been run continuously 24/7 for more than a quarter of century, on many servers, without ever causing any kind of problems or incidents, unlike a lot of much more notorious software packages, which had various bugs despite permanent maintenance.
Cryptographers can be good, bad, be more or less knowledgeable about applied cryptography, and possibly have agendas.
(If my subtext wasn't clear, by the way: the implementation history of ECC is godawful.)
> the implementation history of ECC is godawful
You do know that new cryptographic code can be godawful, then?
ECDSA history is repeating itself again when you consider how poorly the proposed MLKEM RFC deals with side channel resistance:
From draft-ietf-tls-mlkem-8:[1]
"Implementers are encouraged to use implementations resistant to side-channel attacks, especially those that can be applied by remote attackers."
From NIST SP 800-227:[2]
"Cryptographic modules for KEMs should be designed with appropriate countermeasures against side-channel attacks. This includes protecting against timing attacks with constant-time implementations and protecting memory from leakage. Universal guidelines are unlikely to be helpful as exposure to side-channel attacks varies significantly with the desired application, and countermeasures are often costly."
MLKEM is more complex and has more chances of stuff-ups in implementation than ECDSA did. A single sentence of encouragement is all that is on offer from this MLKEM RFC. It doesn't even have the lightweight "Security Considerations" section which RFC8032 for EdDSA provided.[3]
As a point of reference for how hard it is to implement side channel resistant MLKEM see [4] (formal verification) and [5] (errors in formal verification). The MLKEM RFC doesn't offer a "Security Considerations" section to explain how difficult it is to implement side channel resistant MLKEM (perhaps it's easy :S), and if it were hard to implement, to recommend use of EdDSA+MLKEM for cryptography implemented on devices an attacker may be able to physically access, or when used on public networks as a workaround given that side channel resistant EdDSA would be easier to implement.
[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-tls-mlkem/
[2] https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.S...
[3] https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8032/#section-8.1
[4] https://github.com/pq-code-package/mlkem-native/tree/main/pr...
[5] https://eprint.iacr.org/2026/192
edit: added reference 5
The draft only specifies the MLKEM binding into TLS; it'd be out of scope for it to go into detail on implementation considerations for MLKEM. Those would belong in or adjacent to FIPS 203 (the actual MLKEM specification).
> It doesn't even have the lightweight "Security Considerations" section which RFC8032 for EdDSA provided.[3]
It's actually RFC8032 that this criticism would apply to, since it is actually specifying EdDSA, not just referencing it externally.
FIPS 203 doesn't care about side channel resistance, per my other comment at [1]. And this draft doesn't do anything to tighten the constraints on how FIPS 203 should be implemented to provide side channel resistance.
Somehow I wouldn't trust my data on mathematical problems, for which the recommendation is that they would challenge Kayne West.
For most users however, side channel resistance is a very important property that shouldn't be considered an optional after-thought. If standards bodies made it mandatory to consider side channel resistance when standardising cryptography schemes, the choice of what scheme(s) to standardise could look quite different, and thus general use of cryptography would have improved security by default. If some types of users don't care about side channel resistance, then great, make use of non-side-channel-resistant cryptography optional for them to use. Don't standardise it the other way around.
For example:
FIPS 186-5 sB.1 states: "Other (constant time) algorithms that produce an equivalent result may be used."[1]
NIST SP 800-186 sE.4 states: "If one is concerned about side-channel leakage, one should compute the inverse using a constant-time algorithm."[2]
RFC 8032 s8.1 states: "Note that the example implementations in this document do not attempt to be side-channel silent."[3]
A better standard may, for example, _require_ [4] be implemented in order for an implementation to claim conformance with the standard. Not as an optional after-thought. If there are users wanting to trade off side channel resistance for performance gains, then write a new standard to that effect and remove the requirement to implement [4].
A better standardisation process may, for example, only accept candidate algorithms _if_ they are side channel resistant. This opens up the standard to as many use cases as possible. No cutting corners to pretend performance is better for one implementation because it trades off side channel resistance for performance, and no pretending side channel sensitive use cases don't exist.
[1] https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/FIPS/NIST.FIPS.186-5.pdf
[2] https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/SpecialPublications/NIST.S...
[3] https://www.rfc-editor.org/info/rfc8032/#section-8.1
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_curve_point_multiplic...