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Mathematician warns US spies may be weakening next-gen encryption

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Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨RobotToaster@mander.xyz⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2396510-mathematician-warns-us-spies-may-be-weakening-next-gen-encryption/

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  • otter@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Relevant bit for those that don’t click through:

    Daniel Bernstein at the University of Illinois Chicago says that the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is deliberately obscuring the level of involvement the US National Security Agency (NSA) has in developing new encryption standards for “post-quantum cryptography” (PQC). He also believes that NIST has made errors – either accidental or deliberate – in calculations describing the security of the new standards. NIST denies the claims.

    “NIST isn’t following procedures designed to stop NSA from weakening PQC,” says Bernstein. “People choosing cryptographic standards should be transparently and verifiably following clear public rules so that we don’t need to worry about their motivations. NIST promised transparency and then claimed it had shown all its work, but that claim simply isn’t true.”

    Also, is this the same Daniel Bernstein from the 95’ ruling?

    The export of cryptography from the United States was controlled as a munition starting from the Cold War until recategorization in 1996, with further relaxation in the late 1990s.[6] In 1995, Bernstein brought the court case Bernstein v. United States. The ruling in the case declared that software was protected speech under the First Amendment, which contributed to regulatory changes reducing controls on encryption.[7] Bernstein was originally represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.[8] He later represented himself.[9]

    source; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Bernstein

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    • NightLily@lemmy.basedcount.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      So highly reputable source with skin in the game thanks for the explanation.

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      • WhatAmLemmy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        What the fuck? This guys a stone cold fuckin gangster!

        At 24 he took the largest surveillance apparatus in history to court… and won! He even raw dogged it — representing himself for a portion of the trial.

        He’s my hero!

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    • steventhedev@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      It is indeed one and the same. This is the post that triggered this article (warning: it’s long and not well organized): blog.cr.yp.to/20231003-countcorrectly.html

      Credit where credit is due, DJB is usually correct even if he could communicate it better.

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      • dack@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Honestly, I think his communication here is fine. He’s probably going to offend some people at NIST, but it seems like he’s already tried the cooperative route and is now willing to burn some bridges to bring things to light.

        It reads like he’s playing mathematics and not politics, which is exactly what you want from a cryptography researcher.

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    • spaxxor@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Sadly not new. The USA considers encryption to be a weapon of war (thanks Germany), so they do whatever they can to interfere with it. If you are making a new encryption scheme it will be illegal if the government doesn’t have an easy way to break it.

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      • Touching_Grass@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I have a pet theory that a lot of our passionate “movements” that get us all angry and upset are only those movements that benefit someone powerful.

        Its stuff like this that end up being just another coin that jar.

        Like this should piss so many people off. Its something enough people know about. It’s something that you would think would have all kinds of groups up in arms about. Like ask any self respecting 2A enthusiasts if the government should keep skeleton key to every lock in their house.

        Yet there’s fucking nothing but Daniel Bernstein

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      • otter@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        it will be illegal if the government doesn’t have an easy way to break it

        Aren’t there a lot of existing standards already can’t be broken easily (by anyone)? That’s why we have all these recent attempts to force backdoors into encrypted apps

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      • Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        They seem to have calmed that down in recent years, and rely on the dumb public to store all their secrets on readily accessible corporate servers.

        The maths war is hard to win (bigger keys handle most of that), and I honestly doubt most current encryption can be beaten reliably even with quantum computing.

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      • RangerAndTheCat@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Didn’t the same thing happen with TrueCrypt?

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    • ryannathans@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Bernstein’s website safecurves.cr.yp.to/index.html

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    • possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Cool guy

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  • Infinite@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Interesting article and discussion.

    The way Signal is addressing post-quantum encryption is by layering Crystals-KYBER over their current encryption. I initially thought it was overkill, but it’s a great decision.

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    • elscallr@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      My phone has a Kyber crystal?! Awesome!

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    • dansity@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      There is np such thing as overkill while some governments actively funding quantum computing projects for the sole purpose of code cracking

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  • venoft@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Before, elliptical curve encryption has been hailed as the new golden standard, only too bad there is a serious weakness where if you know the seed you can crack the code. And guess who has the seed? Starts with N and ends with SA.

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    • Agent641@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Goddamn NASA and their meddling!

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      • FlyingSquid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        And here I thought it was the National Emergency Services Academy.

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    • red_one@lemmy.probabilitydegeneration.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Curve25519 should be fine.

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  • nephs@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    archive.ph/zFlVi

    Without paywall

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    • Pickle_Jr@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      How do you remove the paywall from the article? Just copy the URL of the article and provide it to archive.today, and that website just bypassed the paywall? How do they manage to bypass it? O.o

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      • nephs@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        They need the content to be available for Google indexing reasons, it can only really be blocked through the client.

        A smart enough backend system can access/crawl/index it, just like Google can. And then make it available to the public without the front end annoyance.

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      • Cethin@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I assume the archive doesn’t run the Javascript portion of the site. You can often bypass pay walls with plug-ins that disable JS as well.

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      • tycho@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I dont think anyone will come to share this knowledge with us since it could be used by newspapers website to block the archiving.

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  • ryannathans@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Yeah you can observe this with letsencrypt failing to generate a certificate if you change the elliptic curve from an NSA generated curve to a generic/known safe one. Forces all signed certificates to use curves that are known to have issues, deliberate or otherwise.

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    • saddlebag@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Can you elaborate on this? Which curves does it happen with? Is there some source that you’ve seen?

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      • ryannathans@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        aussie.zone/comment/3519526

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    • Natanael@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      You can’t use arbitrary curves with certificates, only those which are standardized because the CA will not implement anything which isn’t unambiguously defined in a standard with support by clients.

      community.letsencrypt.org/t/…/3

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      • ryannathans@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        My point is that there is a documented listed of supported curves for ECDSA but attempting to use any other safe curve in the list results in a failure. I am not trying to use some arbitrary curve.

        If your point is that no safe curve is permitted because the powers that be don’t permit it, TLS is doomed.

        eff-certbot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/using.html#u…

        The default is a curve widely believed to be unsafe, p256, with no functioning safe alternative.

        safecurves.cr.yp.to

        That’s Bernstein’s website if anyone was wondering

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    • possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      That’s worrying

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      • ryannathans@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        aussie.zone/comment/3519526

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  • Jaderick@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I know someone in this field and sent him this article. He said the “NIST isn’t being transparent” claim isn’t true

    tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=92… nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ir/…/NIST.IR.8309.pdf tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=93…

    He also responded with “of course the NSA would try and mess with it, but if it’s peer reviewed properly I don’t see how they would be successful”

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    • wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      We know for a fact that they have done it in the last and managed to hide it until it was too late, what makes you think they can’t do it again?

      en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG

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      • Jaderick@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        peer reviewed properly

        Is the important bit here. The timeline from that Wikipedia article shows it was published in 2005 and work disproving it’s claim came around in 2006.

        If a scientists work is retracted it really kills any more funding they receive. They use examples like the DRBG one as what not to be.

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      • agitatedpotato@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Looking at the history of the any of the Clandestine US orgs should probably reminds us these people will do loterally anything that they can, like give people LSD in an attempt to control the mind and put microphones in Russian cats.

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    • MonkderZweite@feddit.ch ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      but if it’s peer reviewed properly

      Is it?

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    • Technus@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Did you send him Bernstein’s original blog post?

      blog.cr.yp.to/20231003-countcorrectly.html

      Unless he’s just making all of this up, it does seem pretty damning.

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    • Natanael@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      More

      ioc.exchange/@matthew_d_green/111227561852301733

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