philodeon

I’m not sure why you’re hung up on SNTRUP, since DJB didn’t submit it past round 2 of NISTPQC. In round 3, DJB put his full weight behind Classic McEliece.

You’ve previously argued that “cryptosystems based on ring-LWE hardness have been worked on by giants in the field since the mid-1990s” and suggested this is a point in Kyber’s favor. Well, news flash, McEliece has been worked on by giants in the field for 45 years. It shows up in NSA’s declassified internal history book, though their insights into the crypto system are still classified to this day.

Very very incorrect.

EDIT: Adding more to my post here because it would be hypocritical for you to complain:

1. I feel like given how I can make accurate predictions about Henry’s sphere of influence, that might gain me a little credibility: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45495180

2. The reason I insulted you is because I know for a fact that when the mob came and demanded you shun and persecute someone, you caved.

At least in terms of the Bada55 paper, I think he writes in a fairly jocular style that sounds unprofessional unless you read his citations as well. You seem to object to his occasional jocularity and take it as prima facie evidence of him being “batshit”. Given that you are well known for a jocular writing style, perhaps you should extend some grace.

The slides seem like a pretty nice summary of the 2015-era SafeCurves work, which you acknowledge elsewhere on this site (this thread? They all blend together) was based on good engineering.

I didn’t see anything “batshit” in either the paper or the slides.

There’s also a more approachable set of slides on the topic at https://cr.yp.to/talks/2025.11.14/slides-djb-20251114-safecu...

That article is pure horsecrap: https://eindhoven.cr.yp.to/false-statements-by-henry-de-vale...

I thought one of the benefits of diversity and inclusion in tech was that it would lead to better software quality? When does that kick in?

I thought the whole point of DJB’s “cache timing attacks in AES” is that Rijndael is not particularly great.

“Module-LWE is not breakable within a Python script” —-Ptacek, 2025

“Apache chunked encoding is not exploitable” —- Dowd, 2002

When someone discovers the trick necessary to decrypt ML-KEM in an hour and publishes it in the unclassified sphere, I assume your response will be “hey, I may have been wrong yet again, but at least I wasn’t impudent!”

I fully agree Matthew Garrett is not a secret NSA propagandist. There is a much simpler explanation.

In 2016, Isis Lovecruft was romantically involved with Jacob Appelbaum. Isis lost a coveted PhD student spot studying under Bernstein to… Jacob Appelbaum. Isis broke up with Jacob and accused him of sexual abuse in a spectacularly public manner.

Isis became romantically involved with Henry de Valence, another Bernstein PhD student. Valence became acquainted with Appelbaum. Later, under Isis’ direction, Valence published a wild screed full of bizarre accusations trying to get Appelbaum expelled and Bernstein fired. When this failed, Isis dumped Valence and publicly accused him of sexual abuse.

Isis Lovecruft is now married to Matthew Garrett. Obviously Matthew is going to work to discredit Bernstein, because if he fails, he knows what the next two steps are.

You seem blind to the obvious corollary to that fact, which is if cryptosystems based on ring-LWE hardness have been worked on by giants for 30 years, then those same cryptosystems have been cryptanalyzed for 30 years, and a significant chunk of cryptanalytic research stays in NSA’s Classified Mathematics Library.

You’ve admitted you were “loudly wrong” when you announced Dual-EC couldn’t be an NSA cryptography backdoor. Snowden let us all know the NSA spends $250 million every year secretly convincing/bribing the private sector to use bad cryptography. Despite that history, you are still convinced there’s no way ML-KEM is an NSA cryptographic backdoor and that all the bizarre procedural errors in the PQ crypto contest are mere coincidences.

[checks my text messages] Lucy just texted me, Thomas. She’s outside waiting for you to kick her football.

Why anyone thinks that the tech sphere is yearning for another “moderation team” after the past decade is beyond me.

ML-KEM and SIKE were both candidates in the PQ competition which ML-KEM won. SIKE was considered such a strong contender that it was used in production TLS experiments at scale by Google and Cloudflare. (I guess you didn’t read past the second paragraph?)

You find it offensive now to compare ML-KEM and SIKE because SIKE was so thoroughly broken and demonstrated to be worse than pre-quantum crypto. But ML-KEM may already be broken this thoroughly by NSA and friends, and they’re keeping it secret because shipping bad crypto to billions of people enables SIGINT. The idea that your professional crypto acquaintances might be on the NSA’s payroll clearly disturbs you enough that you dismiss it out of hand.

Bernstein is proposing more transparency because that is what was promised after the Dual-EC debacle. Do you disagree with Bernstein because he advocates for transparency (which could prevent bad crypto shipping), or because of his rhetorical style?

According to the New York Times in 2013, based on Snowden documents, the NSA allocates $250 million every year for the actions you quoted. They call it the “SIGINT Enabling Project”.

They are not running out of resources.

You are not allowed to have a moderate opinion on gender representation in tech, and you are not allowed to have photos of steak on your NixOS discussion forum profile:

https://srid.ca/nixos-mod

And a member of the steering committee explained in the discussion thread that “undue interference” really means that the Moderation Team is completely autonomous and unaccountable, and not moderating the community according to the official Code of Conduct but rather their own political whims.

Yes, that is precisely my point.

“ According to an intelligence budget document leaked by Mr. Snowden, the N.S.A. spends more than $250 million a year on its Sigint Enabling Project, which "actively engages the U.S. and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products’ designs" to make them "exploitable." ... One goal in the agency’s 2013 budget request was to “influence policies, standards and specifications for commercial public key technologies,” the most common encryption method.” —New York Times

When you turn off the bad cryptography, the product becomes unusable.

The purpose of a system is what it does.

MIE is a combination of enhanced MTE (EMTE) and some highly-overdue software allocator improvements.

> In 2018, we were the first in the industry to deploy Pointer Authentication Codes (PAC) in the A12 Bionic chip, to protect code flow integrity in the presence of memory corruption. The strong success of this defensive mechanism in increasing exploitation complexity left no doubt that the deep integration of software and hardware security would be key to addressing some of our greatest security challenges.

There have been multiple full-chain attacks since the introduction of PAC. It hasn’t been a meaningful attack deterrent because attackers keep finding PAC bypasses. This should give you pause as to how secure EMTE actually is.

DNSSEC most certainly does _not_ protect any data that an end user cares about.

One wonders how seriously this tribute should be taken given that the educational institution referenced has the acronym NUTS.

Lehrer performed it charmingly on Parkinson:

https://youtu.be/R6qFG0uop9k

As sad as today is, the one ray of sunshine here is that Tom Lehrer’s obit was written so long ago (and saved for the day it would be needed), that no one updated it with the subsequent revelation that his work at the Atomic Energy Commission was actually a cover story for his far more sensitive work at the fledgling National Security Agency.

Seeing the New York Times publish wrong out-of-date information has been funny since Judith Miller.

He gave a lovely little performance in the late 1990s to celebrate one of his fellow mathematicians:

https://youtu.be/zxFCQplZgKI

You’ve never read the story of the Halifax Slasher, have you?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halifax_Slasher

Isn’t this how a court system works?

You can put Asahi Linux on them.