Hacker News Reader

Comment by setquk | Hacker News Reader

Just the heritage and reputation of the NSA in such matters should be enough to avoid using NSA ciphers.

You don’t go back to a restaurant if you see someone spitting on your food.

No, no. You don't understand. That's the other side of the kitchen that was spitting in people's food last week. Your friendly waiter obviously got your food from the clean side this week! And it's clearly offensive to even ask whether your plate could have gotten near the known spitters, which is why he refuses to answer.

LOL -- you didn't read the article did you?

> The NSA (in particular, the exact same person who previously promoted DUAL_EC in ISO) proposed to include Simon & Speck

The author is pointing out that the same person spit in your food before.

I'm nearly certain the parent commenter was being sarcastic.

The original analogy was good - the commenter diminishes it by trying to portray the NSA person responsible as a different actor. This is the same person who has burned the community before. That old adage about fooling someone once applies here, and for good reason.

Focusing responsibility on the individual NSA agent is a red herring - the entire organization is the hostile party. Would you judge the situation differently if it were a different operative pushing Speck?

The asset themselves probably isn't even privy to the actual existence of a backdoor, due to compartmentalization and for the sake of their own sincerity.

They're more akin to the waiter. A waiter that doesn't want to think too hard about whether your food was spit in, as their job depends on not knowing. How are you doing today? smile

This is my entire original point. Literally being associated with the organisation taints the product if it is 100% legitimate or not.

That's the waiter.

Unfortunately, the NSA also happens to be the single largest, best-funded collection of cryptographers in the world (probably - who knows how big 3PLA/4PLA are), and do have a history of mostly-beneficial relationships with the crypto community. If you ignore NSA ciphers, you may just be trading vulnerability to the NSA for vulnerability to everyone.

Really? Name one NSA cipher that is better than an equivalent academic-designed cipher? DES? SHA2?

You get original DES, I get DES with the NSA-designed S-boxes. Want to make a bet about whose messages get cracked first?

By the NSA?

By anyone, but if adversary was NSA at the time of adoption of their suggested S-boxes then I still win.

> If you ignore NSA ciphers, you may just be trading vulnerability to the NSA for vulnerability to everyone.

Rijndael is not an NSA cipher.

These days I would not use any cipher pushed by any government unless the entire design process itself was done in the open. Chinese and Russian ciphers inspire even less confidence.

You have to do 3 rounds with these different ciphers, so all 3 stooges have to get along to decrypt your communication.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com