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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

For every person with the seriousness and capability to actually understand the crypto risks of an implementation there seem to be about 50 "I think" people that most often than not are "too paranoid with the wrong things", think they know crypto but don't know basic math, etc

Like using 1 as the e in RSA instead of 65537. (This discussion happened in a encrypted chat app, can't remember). And then blam, first comment when this was detected, is by an "expert" saying how it should be 1 instead of 65537. Zero knowledge of how RSA works and how 1 makes absolutely no sense there.

One of the biggest risks of encryption now is noise. And clueless developers (including API developers), but hopefully we'll find out that there are obscure interests between leaving APIs with ECB encryption available.

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I kind of worry about that, too. Up until now, it has been NSA pretty much the ones establishing the new security standards, since they have the best minds on it.

But now we can't trust them, or even anyone who's "worked" for them, but now quit because of it was revealed that they are doing with their work (at least I like to imagine there are people who think like that at the NSA).

So what now? I guess my hope is more math and cryptography professors from around the world (not just US), will put their minds to work on this, in the interest of the whole Internet community. If that happens, in the end would be for the best.

Here's an idea for one of those "We The People" petitions: split up the NSA's COMSEC and SIGINT/MASINT divisions into two-or-more agencies. The COMSEC one can keep being the "National Security Agency"; the SIGINT one can be the "Central Signals Agency" or something[1]. Now add a law stating that:

- the CSA can't do any SIGINT that works at cross-purposes to the NSA's mission (e.g. putting backdoors in crypto libraries so widely-used that government secrets are likely riding over lines relying on those libraries somewhere), and that

- any time the CSA discovers a problem with crypto the NSA relies on, they have to immediately communicate that fact to the NSA, and that communication has to go through public channels.

With that in place, I'd feel safe (in fact, safer than ever before) trusting the NSA's crypto. They'd have one pure incentive-structure: good crypto for securing gov/mil communications; and the CSA, though wreaking havoc everywhere else, would be locked out of hindering them in it.

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[1] not "Foreign Signals Agency", since they don't seem to plan on relinquishing their Domestic Signals.

You think adding laws is going to solve the problem?

Not a chance.

Solve which problem? Adding laws could solve the very small problem of "NSA crypto being trustworthy crypto for use by anyone other than the NSA." Obviously my proposal won't solve any large problems (like making the organization I dubbed the CSA stop... doing the stuff it does; which implicitly further requires that the government stop wanting them to do that stuff.) But specific problems have specific solutions.

> Up until now, it has been NSA pretty much the ones establishing the new security standards, since they have the best minds on it.

They have? I thought they were still regularly fought and ignored by the rest of the crypto community.

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