Cryptographer DJ Bernstein Criticizes Push to Finalize Post-Quantum Cryptography
The U.S. NSA is truly insidious and an enemy of freedom (privacy). They are now attempting to rush through a quantum cryptography standard without proper consensus from the cryptography community, some of whom raise valid concerns about what is being proposed. The NSA has [a history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG) of intentional sabotage of cryptography standards, giving themselves (and other adversaries) sly backdoor access to presumed private communications.
Thank you, [Dan Bernstein](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_J._Bernstein), for [once again](
standing up to power and fighting for our collective right to privacy.
> By 2013, NSA had a [quarter-billion-dollar-a-year budget](https://www.eff.org/files/2014/04/09/20130905-guard-sigint_enabling.pdf) to "covertly influence and/or overtly leverage" systems to "make the systems in question exploitable"; in particular, to "influence policies, standards and specification for commercial public key technologies". NSA is [quietly using stronger cryptography for the data it cares about]( but meanwhile is spending money to promote a market for weakened cryptography, the same way that it successfully created decades of security failures by [building up](https://cr.yp.to/export/dtn/V3N4_10_92.pdf) the market for, e.g., 40-bit RC4 and 512-bit RSA and [Dual EC]( I looked concretely at what was happening in [IETF's TLS working group]( compared to the [consensus requirements]( for standards-development organizations. I reviewed how a call for "adoption" of an NSA-driven specification produced a variety of [objections]( that [weren't handled properly]( ("Adoption" is a preliminary step before IETF standardization....) On 5 November 2025, the chairs issued "[last call](https://web.archive.org/web/20251122073342/https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/tls/Pzdox1sDDG36q19PWDVPghsiyXA/)" for objections to publication of the document. The deadline for input is "2025-11-26", **this coming Wednesday**.
Cryptologist DJB Criticizes Push to Finalize Non-Hybrid Security for Post-Quantum Cryptography - Slashdot
In October cryptologist/CS professor Daniel J. Bernstein alleged that America
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Deeplinks Blog
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2025.10.04: NSA and IETF
D. J. Bernstein / Papers
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2025.10.04: NSA and IETF
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2025.10.04: NSA and IETF
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2025.10.04: NSA and IETF
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2025.10.04: NSA and IETF
Stacker News
Cryptographer DJ Bernstein Criticizes Push to Finalize Post-Quantum Cryptography \ stacker news ~privacy
The U.S. NSA is truly insidious and an enemy of freedom (privacy). They are now attempting to rush through a quantum cryptography standard without ...