Ah now I see what the question was as it seemed like a non sequitur. I misunderstood the comment by foxboron to be concerns about any backdoors not that P256 is backdoored, I hold no such view of that, surely bitcoin should be good evidence.
Instead I was stating that weaknesses in cryptography have been historically put there with some NSA involvement at times.
For DB: The brain pool curves do have a worse leak, but as stated in the dragon blood paper “we believe that these sidechannels are inherent to Dragonfly”. The first attack submission did hit P-256 setups before the minimal iteration count was increased and afterward was more applicable to same-system cache/ micro architectural bugs. These attacks were more generally correctly mitigated when H2C deterministic algorithms rolled out. There’s many bad choices that were selected of course to make the PAKE more exploitable, putting the client MAC in the pre commits, having that downgrade, including brain pool curves. but to my point on committees— cryptographers warned strongly when standardizing that this could be an attack and no course correction was taken.
yes dragon blood. I’m not speaking of the downgrade but the timing sidechannels
— which were called out very loudly and then ignored during standardization. and then the PAKE showed up in wpa3 of all places, that was the key issue and was extended further in a brain pool curve specific attack for the proposed initial mitigation. It’s a good example of error by committee I do not address that article and don’t know why the NSA advised migration that early.
The riddle paper I’ve not read in a long time if ever, though I don’t understand the question. As Scott Aaronson recently blogged it’s difficult to predict human progress with technology and it’s possible we’ll see shors algorithm running publicly sooner than consensus. It could be that in 2035 the NSA’s call 20 years prior looks like it was the right one in that ECC is insecure but that wouldn’t make the replacements secure by default ofc
It would be wise for people to remember that it’s worth doing basic sanity checks before making claims like no backdoors from the NSA. strong encryption has been restricted historically so we had things like DES and 3DES and Crypto AG. In the modern internet age juniper has a bad time with this one https://www.wired.com/2013/09/nsa-backdoor/.
Usually it’s really hard to distinguish intent, and so it’s possible to develop plausible deniability with committees. Their track record isn’t perfect.
With WPA3 cryptographers warned about the known pitfall of standardizing a timing sensitive PAKE, and Harkin got it through anyway. Since it was a standard, the WiFi committee gladly selected it anyway, and then resulted in dragonbleed among other bugs. The techniques for hash2curve have patched that
That isn’t an agreement to buy