NSA and IETF, Part 9: 82 Opponents, Yet Chairs Declare 'Rough Consensus'
In the latest installment of his series on NSA influence in IETF, Daniel J. Bernstein reports that 82 people voiced unambiguous opposition to a spec that would remove ECC from hybrid ECC+ML-KEM in TLS. Despite this, the working group chairs declared 'rough consensus' using shifting rationales, including disenfranchising new participants and redefining consensus. Bernstein documents the procedural violations and forwards opposition statements to IESG.
The chairs ignored the rules and declared 'rough consensus' to issue this spec as an RFC.
- philodeon
I enjoyed the @tptacek cameo. I suspect tptacek didn’t.
- ifh-hn
Can someone ELI5 what the issue is here? I feel like I'm missing a lot of nuance here. Are the NSA people attempting to weaken TLS by removing ECC?
- stackghost
It's never been clear to me why NSA's "blue team" directorates haven't been spun off into a separate agency. Sure, NSA strengthened the S-boxes in DES and SHA-1 but from the outside there's no way to know whether they're making DES stronger against differential cryptanalysis or whether they're introducing a DUAL_EC-style vulnerability.
I'm sure there's a game-theoretic optimum choice when it comes to accepting proposals from the NSA vs rejecting them out of hand, but I'm not sure what that optimal choice is.
- alfiedotwtf
I thought this was going to be rehashing of the old NULL-cypher IPsec thread, but it’s a different thing.
Maybe we should treat standards like we do a free market - let anyone implement what they choose then let people chose which to adopt, but the main thing is get government out of the entire process.
If the government wants to standardise, that’s fine… just don’t make it an industry standard adopted by civilians. Let them have their weakened protocols will the market moves on
- jauntywundrkind
> I'm happy to report that 82 people spoke up on the TLS mailing list in unambiguous opposition to this spec during the voting period
How many of them spoke before on this mailing list, in any capacity what so ever? I suspect this is 99% people who showed up because you organized a brigadging, because you incited people and told them to show up and be completely outraged.
There's a >0% chance that DJB could be correct that there is some risk to this spec (which notably is not seeking recommendation status! So WTF?) The people approving and wanting this aren't fools, aren't lackies, aren't some great foe. There's little real opposition? Making up ghosts and enemies lurking in every corner, brigading people to show up in IETF meetings, who have never participated before, just to spread heat and anger you've programmed them for, is ignoble & indecent.
All too recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48760490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48811887