At the risk of belaboring the obvious: An attacker won't have to say "Oops, researcher X is working in public and has just found an attack; can we suppress this somehow?" if the attacker had the common sense to hire X years earlier, meaning that X isn't working in public. People arguing that there can't be sabotage because submission teams can't be bribed are completely missing the point.
He goes on to say:
I coined the phrase "post-quantum cryptography" in 2003. It's not hard to imagine that the NSA/IDA post-quantum attack team was already hard at work before that, that they're years ahead of the public in finding attacks, and that NSA has been pushing NISTPQC to select algorithms that NSA secretly knows how to break.
Does this seem unreasonable, and if so, why?
He also remarks:
Could such a weakness also be exploited by other large-scale attackers? Best bet is that the answer is yes. Would this possibility stop NSA from pushing for the weakness? Of course not.
Doesn’t sound to me like he only has concerns about bribery. Corruption of the standards to NSA’s benefit is one overarching issue. It’s not the only one, he has concerns about non-American capabilities as well.
The are many methods for the NSA to achieve a win.
Ridiculing people for worrying about this is totally lame and is harmful to the community.
To suggest a few dozen humans are beyond reproach from attack by the most powerful adversaries to ever exist is extremely naive at best. However that literally isn’t even a core point as Bernstein notes clearly.
FFS nobody is saying that the general idea of being skeptical is unreasonable. And nobody is being ridiculed for doing such. This subthread is about the contents of tptacek’s comment, which doesn't do what you are saying. Saying DJB’s claims are inconceivable is the mischaracterization. People are very eager to paint a picture nobody intended so they can say something and be right.
I use djb’s crypto. Everybody knows his speculation. Everybody knows why he’s pursuing more information. Nobody disagrees more information would be a public good. Some people are more skeptical than others that he’ll find anything substantial.
> If you RTFA you'd know it pertains to bribery, not coercion
By quoting the article it seems the text directly contradicts your summary as being too narrow. General coercion is also be included as part of the concerns raised by TFA. He isn’t just talking about NSA giving a person a sack of money.
Meanwhile in this thread and on Twitter, many people are indeed doing the things you say that nobody is doing.
We almost all use Bernstein’s crypto — some as mere users, others as developers, etc. I’m not sure what that brings to the discussion.
I’m glad we agree that his work to gather more information is a public good.
The article discusses it generally but uses bribery as the example. Perhaps that’s the confusion. Someone said the idea that we’re gonna find bribes is silly. Someone else said that’s insane, how could you not imagine the govt doing something coercive. Reply was that’s not what I said. Another challenge follows asserting that the gov’t is generally shady and coercive. I tried to clarify what I see as the confusion (bribery vs coercion as an example used in the article). Sorry if my statement was overly broad, my intention was to say we’re probably mostly on the same side and arguing over semantics. Maybe not all of the world is (e.g. Twitter), but it seemed like the case here. Maybe not and tptacek believes the gov’t is infallible. IDK. I like DJB and appreciate what he’s doing.
