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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

That can't be the argument --- it can't be that NSA simply knows a vulnerability that impacts one very specific lattice scheme and not the others. The reason for that is a cryptographic concept known as the Vizzini Conjecture: the argument you just put forward can be applied to literally any cryptographic standard NIST authors. Since NSA knows that, and knows you know it, you can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. It must be that the standard NIST picks is the only secure one, so that NSA can see it tainted by NIST association.

But yes, this is the useful conversation to have. There are other scenarios! You can get into more detail on where MLKEM came from, for instance.

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Yes, they trick me and I pick the poisoned wine... But wait, no, I used a hybrid. Imagine the code can't be backdoored (it's proven not to crash/be slow/be exploitable) so at worst it can make the security no better. At best, the NSA knows a whole new subfield of cryptography (from history: differential cryptanalysis) and it really is more secure.

They laugh at us while we try to think of how 1024 is better than 768: "bigger is better, right?" "does 1024 refer to the number of years it takes Nightmare Moon to break the code?"

There is nobody at IETF saying you shouldn't use a hybrid! In fact, it's the exact opposite: hybrid ECDH/MLKEM is a standards-track RFC, and the proposed pure-MLKEM RFC is not, nor is it "Recommended" (in IETF parlance).

Let's keep the thread coherent: the original claim, by cryptographer 'cassonmars, is that the issue here is NSA pushing bad standards. It's not "hybrid vs. pure", which is a non-issue. All I asked for was a plausible story about how NSA might have pushed a bad PQC standard.

No, the original claim was by me. And I gave you a plausible story. You just didn’t want to hear it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48820336

This is a link to a comment from 38 days ago.

> Let's keep the thread coherent: the original claim

How do you save your poisoned wine? A hybrid with 1024 is made less trustworthy if the NSA pushes 1024 alone, since then we know that they want customers to use 1024 alone, which is what they would want if it was weak. But they know that we would know that, so if they really want to help us they should withdraw the draft. If it was strong but we know why, they shouldn't want to make us doubt ourselves. If it is strong (and 512 and 768 are not) they can't tell us, and can only subtly point to their own double encryption and security level documents. The only move that can cover all the cases is a hybrid with 1024, so this draft is a bad standard.

In fact, the default behavior in every web browser right now is to use a hybrid.

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