Techrights

Lots of Talk About NIST in Relation to Encryption and Standards, But NIST Fronts for Imperialism, Not Privacy, and There Are Software Patent Elephants in the Room

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 25, 2024,

updated Aug 25, 2024

THE OFFICIAL WEB SITE of NIST is (right at this very moment) celebrating mega-bailouts for failing chipmakers that put back doors (and defects, bug doors etc.) in all their current chips, except perhaps for those tailored/specially-made for military purposes. The front page says: "CHIPS for America: Investments in innovation, resilience and a more competitive American future..."

We've long (over a decade!) pointed out that NIST does not pursue real security. The same is true for NSA, IETF, and several other internationally-recognised entities. Well, there are nearly a dozen of these in the US alone and most people recognise the acronyms/logos; they're used a lot - sparingly in fact - in the sciences, typically framed or presented like trusted establishments to be blindly worshiped, adored, followed, conformed and adhered to. IETF is US like ITC is US. Look beyond the ludicrous facade. Whose authority is obeyed?

A lot of those entrusted to standardise encryption are - at the same time - interested in undermining/bypassing encryption (intercepts and wiretapping). They want encryption reserved to those who are in positions of powers; to everybody else they already gave fake encryption and fake security. This self-aggrandising sense of entitlement and empowerment comes naturally to people drunk on power.

NIST et al routinely get caught in "oversights", "oopses", accidents", and "mistakes" in their recommendations (poor specifications that become implementations will never be secure!), which probably make no sense at all even before such "bugs" or "loopholes" are found. They talk about hypothetical and theoretical (prospective) risks while overlooking and intentionally ignoring imminent and even existing ones.

Only a week or so ago the media said that NIST released "First Post-Quantum Encryption Algorithms"...

Wow, "Quantum"!!! Amazing!! Let's not ask any questions or they'll make us look dumb and arcane.

But, as noted to us today, there are also software patents to worry about.

"NIST realises that software patents are ruining encryption," we said, citing this older thread, but that's actually NIST being confronted by outsiders in NIST-related discussion channels. "Ruining encryption," an associate noted, means "sabotaging security". I said this was potential lawfare ("I cannot break it, but I can sue you").

"If one wanted to be paranoid," the associate said, "one could ask who put them up to that patent nonsense. Sure the patsies stand to gain financially but that is a small thing compared to the interests which gain by eliminating air tight-encryption and having someone else take the blame for it. (c.f. [Telegram Founder Pavel] Durov arrest over his proprietary "app")."

"Signal is AGPL (copyleft) all the way through, unlike Telegram which is proprietary. The proprietary, centralized nature of Telegram possibly makes it feasible to wrest control from the owner. Whereas with Signal, people would just spin up new instances and, in the worst case, fork the code. Thus copyleft may have provided some unexpected protection for privacy. However, Signal has traditionally been tied to actual identities via mobile phone numbers up until this year. So it's not truly anonymous either." [ 1, 2] (IMEI)

The subject of software patents seems to have been brought up as recently as months ago by "D. J. Bernstein" <djb@cr.yp.to>, who wrote:

>

The elephant in the room is the patent minefield surrounding Kyber. NIST

says it has bought Kyber licenses for the two oldest patent families, but

* those licenses are only for exactly what NIST ends up standardizing

(supposedly the standards will appear this year), so IETF doesn't

have change control---for example, if security continues to degrade

(as I expect it will), then presumably IETF will consider modifying

Kyber to provide security levels beyond Kyber-1024, but this would

go beyond what's allowed by the licenses; and

* there are other patents in the area, including at least one patent

holder publicly claiming Kyber coverage, with no public response

from NIST or from the Kyber team.

There's more in there, but this message is more detailed and not so old:

>

Paul Wouters writes:

Should the IETF really recommend a dropped candidate at this stage?

Yes. IETF policy prefers algorithms with no known patent claims. BCP 79

does not authorize delegating IETF's patent-related decisions to NIST.

Furthermore, the notion that NIST is speaking for a unified community

is easy to disprove. For example,

https://web.archive.org/web/20230401090854/https://secdev.ieee.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/LaMacchia-Keynote-IEEESecDev2022.pdf

revealed that ISO's crypto group agreed---in October 2022, months after

NIST announced its selection---to initiate a preliminary work item on a

very different list of algorithms. There are three algorithms on that

list; one matches a NIST selection (Kyber), one is under consideration

by NIST for possible future standardization (Classic McEliece), and one

was dropped by NIST (FrodoKEM).

Patent claims are not the issue, as long as the conditions for using

the patents are not encumbered.

As I wrote before: "there are other patents in the area, including at

least one patent holder publicly claiming Kyber coverage, with no public

response from NIST or from the Kyber team". I quoted and cited a message

that says "Kyber is covered by our patents"; I commented that the author

of that message "holds patents CN107566121 etc., filed before Kyber was

published".

Clearly this qualifies as a "known IPR claim" under BCP 79. I see no

evidence of an "offer of royalty-free licensing" under BCP 79.

It seems that those will not be an issue as otherwise the NIST chosen

algorithm would not be useful.

My message already cited examples of the patent minefield to some extent

delaying and to some extent deterring Kyber deployment. If "will" is

alluding to the activation of the patent licenses once NIST actually

issues a standard: sure, that deals with two patents (assuming NIST has

been correctly summarizing the license terms), but the minefield is

bigger than that, as illustrated by the further patent claim above.

The Crypto Panel review also listed some technical points, which you

seem to have left out in your latest email

No, I didn't leave them out. I explicitly focused on the Crypto Review

Panel comments regarding sntrup---because I was explicitly replying to

comments you made regarding sntrup. Here's your text (followed by many

more recent references to NIST's actions regarding sntrup):

With this NTRUprime case, we have a less clear example. Itâs not

broken but the IETF Crypto Panel also said the cryptographic method

used was somewhat dated and would no longer be recommended by the

larger cryptographic community at this point.

Your SAAG presentation at IETF 119 claimed that the review had said "we

would have done it like this 15 years ago but these days we wouldn't do

it like this anymore so we shouldn't really like standardize that".

Looking broadly at how the review as a whole is being used, I see four

basic issues:

* The review and the followup action both failed to consider the

patent situation. This is not in line with BCP 79.

* The portion of the review regarding sntrup was completely

non-technical, with no evident content beyond delegating IETF/IRTF

cryptographic decisions to NIST. The review was not "critical,

objective, timely and consistent review of cryptographic

algorithms".

* While I agree that the review did make technical comments regarding

an issue beyond sntrup (the choice of combiner), those comments are

not even marginally consistent with how combiners are being handled

elsewhere in IETF and IRTF. (In case readers are interested in the

details, see postscript below.)

* The text of the review does not match what it has been portrayed in

SAAG as saying.

As an example of the last issue: The SAAG portrayal is that the review

text expressed opposition to documentation and/or standardization of

what has been deployed in real-world SSH. The actual review text

https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/crypto-panel/kDiLLcVOhwoix5BUDdv4r91ZhfY/

sounds much less extreme, with mere "suggestions" to "describe much more

explicitly the combiner use", to add citations, and to "consider"

including Kyber.

As another example, I see nothing in the review text assigning a

positive/negative rating, so it's improper to attribute such a rating to

the review. This rating appears to be something that a particular AD

projected onto the review. The source should be properly labeled.

The fact that the cryptographic research communities are focusing on

NIST candidates does mean that those proposed algorithms will see a

lot more scrutiny and research.

The hypothesis and conclusion of this circular argument are both easily

disproven by the available data. Skimming https://eprint.iacr.org/2024

from top down right now for the ten most recent post-quantum papers, I

find the following:

https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/564 (attacking isogenies generally)

https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/561 (an isogeny proposal)

https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/555 (attacking lattices generally)

https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/551 (Kyber and NewHope)

https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/548 (NTRU)

https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/530 (an NTRU variant)

https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/523 (Kyber)

https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/512 (Dilithium)

https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/500 (SPHINCS+)

https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/490 (new MPC-based signatures)

A solid half of these are on algorithms that have been either removed by

NIST or that are newer than anything submitted to NIST. Another two are

_overlapping_ NIST but also including other cryptosystems. Only three

fit within the alleged "focus".

that is not a political argument

The text I quoted from the Crypto Review Panel regarding sntrup is

purely making claims about politics (again, dictionary definition:

"competition between competing interest groups or individuals for power

and leadership"). Making claims that _aren't_ in the text, and saying

that _those_ claims aren't political, doesn't contradict this.

More to the point, my description of the review had nothing whatsoever

to do with the identity of the reviewer, so it wasn't an ad-hominem

attack. Please withdraw your claim to the contrary.

Some people prefer to not engage with you due to previous negative

experiences with your method of discussion.

Now _that's_ an ad-hominem attack. Please (1) apologize and (2) keep

yourself under control in the future. Thanks in advance.

Getting back to sntrup: You've referred to secret "informal

conversations" as supposedly justifying opposition to sntrup. Let me

point out that this provides an easy explanation for the gaps between

* the Crypto Review Panel text and

* your description of that text.

Specifically, couldn't it be that what you're attributing to the Crypto

Review Panel is actually what's coming from those secret conversations,

and you simply lost track of the source?

Also, have you considered the possibility that the conclusions in those

conversations come from underlying errors that would be corrected if the

arguments were raised in public? Look at the above "scrutiny" claim:

it's the sort of error that can easily be repeated because it _sounds_

reasonable, but transparency allows the claim to be rapidly debunked.

your statement that Roman promised publication

[ etc. ]

I don't know what statements you're referring to here; certainly they're

not from me. If you're mixing up the NTRU Prime team, the OpenSSH team,

the author list for this I-D, etc., then please be more careful.

---D. J. Bernstein

P.S. In case readers are interested, here's the combiner issue.

One way to combine pre-quantum and post-quantum shared secrets into a

key for (e.g.) AES-256 or ChaCha20 is to hash the concatenation of the

secrets. This is typically just fine, the main risk being that

* quantum computers break the pre-quantum system and

* a bad choice of post-quantum system is also breakable (as in the

CECPQ2b experiment, which used SIKE to encrypt real user data).

However, there are various papers pointing out contexts where stopping

attacks requires hashing more than the shared secrets. All security

recommendations in these papers are handled by a combiner that hashes

the shared secrets and the full transcript (pre-quantum and post-quantum

public keys and ciphertexts).

Someone reviewing a combiner with anything less than transcript hashing

has to look at the context and ask whether skimping on the hashing is

safe in that context. It's easier for the reviewer to skip this review

and just say "Why aren't you hashing more?". That's what happened in the

Crypto Review Panel review of the combiner in this SSH draft---it wasn't

reviewing whether this is safe in SSH; it was pointing out that this is

doing something that in _some_ contexts is unsafe.

Transcript hashing is cheap. I like making cryptographic choices that

save time for reviewers. So I'd like to see new proposals settling on

_one_ combiner that includes transcript hashing. (To be clear, I don't

see this as an argument against documenting something that has been

widely deployed for two years now.)

Meanwhile there are other people saying that transcript hashing costs

millions of dollars in aggregate and that any unnecessary hash should be

skipped---even if this means that reviewers have to look at different

combiners for different contexts, and check that each of the faster

combiners is safe in the contexts where the combiner is being used.

Here are three examples of combiners not using full transcript hashing:

* A proposal called "X-Wing" uses an ad-hoc "QSF" combiner. This

combiner is unsafe in some contexts.

* draft-ietf-tls-hybrid-design uses a simple concatenation combiner.

This combiner is unsafe in some contexts.

* draft-josefsson-ntruprime-ssh uses a simple concatenation combiner,

This combiner is unsafe in some contexts.

Now compare how this context switch is being handled:

* X-Wing is currently under consideration by CFRG.

* My understanding is that draft-ietf-tls-hybrid-design has reached

consensus except for settling some code points.

* Meanwhile an AD is opposing draft-josefsson-ntruprime-ssh, where,

as far as I can tell, the only _technical_ complaint is that it's

using a concatenation combiner.

This is not even marginally consistent. Sure, X-Wing is in CFRG and

hasn't reached consensus, but this procedural distinction doesn't work

for the TLS example, and it's also missing the point about the content.

The Crypto Review Panel charter asks for "consistent review"; given that

new proposals are being allowed in CFRG and TLS with combiners that can

be unsafe in other contexts, why is draft-josefsson-ntruprime-ssh being

selectively targeted with a complaint that its combiner can be unsafe in

other contexts?

Many questions deserve to be asked here because even software like SSH is at stake, set aside PGP, TLS stuff, disk encryption, and so on. There are too many crackpots in this industry/sector speaking in insults and rude words instead of making sense from a scientific perspective. They resort to name-calling instead of debating. Sometimes they try to make things sound a lot more complicated than they actually are to discourage/repel outside audits, participation, scrutiny etc. So it's filled with posers, imposters, fakers, and narcissistic liars. They want nobody else to participate and they defame the best in the area.

It used to be a field of science, not spies. █