You probably want to mention that some prominent cryptographers think this just astroturfing?
Sure, but lots of people thought it was crazy conspiracy thinking that the NSA backdoored certain
Elliptic CurvesCSPRNGs years ago… yet it turned out they in fact did, and successfully, and it took years to come out. Whether or not some ‘threat model’ applies to the situation.The chances of a normal person being targeted by some obscure NSA backdoor is very low, certainly; but that doesn’t refute the historical fact that they do try to subvert standards processes.
I think it’s funny to think that the NSA has probably defeated RSA and those sketchy ECDSA curves, but they still haven’t broken AES because its symmetric.
that they do try to subvert standards processes.
This is why RSA is considered weak even at 4096. No hacker or APT is gonna break it but the NSA probably can and probably has, even if it was some loophole implementation bug.
When you assume nation state funding and leverage, a lot of baseline security standards go out the window.
I’m more inclined to trust the person using furry comics to explain their reasoning, tbh.
I find it mildly annoying that while the post is replete with hyperlinks, the 2 central terms “ietf-tls-mlkem” and “ietf-tls-ecdhe-mlkem” are simply quoted with no further elaboration.
I am no cryptographer, but after some searching around, my very first order understanding is that mlkem is a new algorithm that is meant to be resistant to attacks by a quantum computer. It is not time-tested at this point, however, while ecdhe is a current (albeit quantum-computer-weak) algorithm that has a solid track record.
Using both in combination is seen by some as a safer way to move forward, since mlkem may yet prove to have a fatal weakness and at least you have that fallback on the tried and true. Advocates also point out that ecdhe is cheap to compute compared to mlkem, and so the overhead of tossing it in there is not the end of the world?
Anyway, that’s all I’ve been able to glean so far.
My assumption is, if the NSA is pushing for a standard, it is not the standard that security conscious people would want adopted.
