Quoting Trent W. Buck ([email protected]): > My (armchair, inexpert) impression is that this isn't a reasonable > inference. > > It'd be like saying "the wheel feel off my bicycle, therefore all > wheeled vehicles are suspect".
Oh, I certainly wasn't saying 'doubt everything', as unfocussed paranoia is pointless and non-functional. Rather doubt _more_ (and examine carefully), is all I was saying. In case you weren't following links, Schneier noted six months ago the curiosity of the Never Say Anything people moving away from elliptic curve cryptography citing some alleged future threat from quantum computing, and linked to both a long academic paper by two cryptographers speculating as to the government's real motives for doing this, and a much shorter commentary and critique of that paper by Matthew Green (http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2015/10/a-riddle-wrapped-in-curve.html). If you’re looking for a nice dose of crypto conspiracy theorizing and want to read a paper by some very knowledgeable cryptographers, I have just the paper for you. Titled “A Riddle Wrapped in an Enigma” by Neal Koblitz and Alfred J. Menezes, it tackles one of the great mysteries of the year 2015. Namely: why did the NSA just freak out and throw its Suite B program down the toilet? Interesting reading -- and again I think of Schneier's dictum that in cryptography newer is worse, all other things being equal. In a nutshell, what Green finds to be the most plausible and compelling hypothesis in Koblitz and Menezes's paper is that NSA isn’t worried about quantum computers at all, but rather that they’ve made a major advance in _classical_ cryptanalysis of the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem, rendering ECC as a class of ciphers generically weak and making its advantage in key length no longer worth the drawback. > You may also wish to be angry about more broadly, about > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIPS_140-2#Reception > http://opensslrampage.org/post/83555615721/the-future-or-lack-thereof-of-libressls-fips I frequently do admire the attitude of Theo de Raadt and company. _______________________________________________ luv-main mailing list [email protected] https://lists.luv.asn.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/luv-main
