This seems to imply that the following could be a plausible chain of events:
1. some of the NSA Suite A ciphers get reverse-engineered by foreign citizens;
2. isomorphic algorithms with equivalent guarantees to those Suite A ciphers are developed, again out-of-country;
3. those algorithms are put into a piece of open-source software and posted online, allowing anyone to use them;
4. industry across the world decides that these "new" ciphers are really good and widely adopts them (e.g. incorporating the code into OpenSSL et al), to the point that they become a de-facto standard;
5. flaws are found in other current ciphers, such that the isomorphic-to-Suite-A ciphers we now have access to become the only conscionably recommendable choices;
Then, at that point, it seems like NIST could now choose to put these isomorphic-to-Suite-A ciphers into a standard, and the NSA couldn't say no. Is that right?
That would be nice. But it seems like US diplomacy has been deployed against anyone claiming to be more secure than US tech companies. It's just crickets out there. Certainly all the Five Eyes's tech companies have been nailed down.
It might happen, but it won't come from a major established tech company in the Americasphere.
1. some of the NSA Suite A ciphers get reverse-engineered by foreign citizens;
2. isomorphic algorithms with equivalent guarantees to those Suite A ciphers are developed, again out-of-country;
3. those algorithms are put into a piece of open-source software and posted online, allowing anyone to use them;
4. industry across the world decides that these "new" ciphers are really good and widely adopts them (e.g. incorporating the code into OpenSSL et al), to the point that they become a de-facto standard;
5. flaws are found in other current ciphers, such that the isomorphic-to-Suite-A ciphers we now have access to become the only conscionably recommendable choices;
Then, at that point, it seems like NIST could now choose to put these isomorphic-to-Suite-A ciphers into a standard, and the NSA couldn't say no. Is that right?