J. Bernsein is my type of guy. He’s opinionated, crabby, curmudgeonly, and brilliant. He’s particularly brilliant when it comes to matters of cryptography. One of the things about being curmudgeonly is that you have little tolerance for lies and nonsense so of course he’s a regular antagonist of the government and, in particular, the NSA.
These days, nobody trusts the NSA but NIST is supposed to be different. Their job is to promulgate standards that benefit commercial entities and private citizens. In the cryptography realm they’re supposed to develop, test, and standardize cryptography primitives that allow companies and citizens to protect their private—predominately commercial—interactions from criminals and fraudsters.
It hasn’t always worked out that way. After getting caught conspiring with the NSA to corrupt the Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator, NIST promised to clean up their act and be more transparent. It was an important promise because their credibility with the crypto using public was on the line.
I, naively, took heart with their promise to be honest brokers going forward. Sadly, according to Bernstein, it hasn’t worked out that way. It appears that they are once again conspiring with the NSA to compromise to corrupt crypto standards and doing everything in their power to cover up that fact.
After having several Freedom of Information requests ignored, Bernstein finally resorted to filing suit to force NIST to reveal their collaboration with the NSA. Follow the link for an excellent history of NIST/NSA collusion from the early days of DES to the current debates about post-quantum algorithms.
It’s sad that the public can’t trust their government to have their backs on cryptographic matters but as Bernstein demonstrates, that’s where we are. I don’t know the answer. I just wish the NSA would put the pubic above their own convenience.