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Comment by RyanZAG | Hacker News Reader

The next message in the thread is interesting too: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/cfrg/current/msg03555.h...

A request to replace him with Bruce Schneier.

Bruce Schneier is not a great pick for this role. The CFRG is an extremely technical working group; the CFRG chair needs to be intimately familiar with a broad selection of modern cryptography. By way of example, Schneier is avowedly unfamiliar with elliptic curve. Schneier is a great popularizer of cryptography, but there are much better choices for the person whose job it will be to spot errors in other standards.

DJB! If you could get him out of his cave at UIC.

Second DJB! Would be the perfect choice, especially now that more and more cryptographers are looking to his curves and protocols, so he already knows what the vision for the future of IETF should be. I'm actually quite excited about the possibility of him being named chair at IETF.

As IETF chair he may be even bring us the elusive "secure by default Internet" with his CurveCP protocol or a future evolution of it. The secure by default Internet has actually been declared one of the main goals of IETF at their recent meeting:

http://www.ietf.org/live/

http://curvecp.org/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8EGA834Nok

The irony of Daniel Bernstein chairing the IETF crypto review board is so potent that I got a small nosebleed just thinking about it. But, nomination emphatically seconded.

For what it's worth, Bernstein spends most of his time in Europe these days.

Now this might be just gossip-mongering, but care to enlighten us on why djb on the IETF crypto review board would be potent irony?

You'd need to have followed Bernstein's other adventures with IETF standards groups, particularly the DNS standards debacle.

I think that's rather the point. Bernstein has had the constitution to call out the nonsense of the NSA-influenced IETF working groups before it was fashionable to do so. I don't think it'd be ironic to consider him as a replacement for an NSA employee on the way out due to that concern.

More just deserts than irony?

Now there is a true mathematician and technologist all rolled into one!

I think that Bruce Schneier has in some regards become to HN what "Neil deGrasse Tyson" is to reddit.

Who would be good choices that aren't already participating?

Phil Rogaway.

Matt Green.

Daniel Bernstein.

Kenny Paterson.

Paulo Barreto.

Scott Fluhrer.

Tanja Lange.

Of that list, looking at it now that I've written it, I think Kenny Paterson might be my favorite choice; he's done very important recent work on (breaking) TLS and is an eloquent and convincing writer and translator of the cryptographic literature.

djb, for the entertainment value if nothing else. =)

Matt Green, I've been impressed with his writing.

Maybe agl? Probably more because he's got good perspective from the implementation side.

"djb, for the entertainment value if nothing else. =)"

Well, no one expects the IETF to get anything done, anyway....

Is Dorothy Denning still working actively?

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