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I am not part of the drama, but isn’t his argument that hybrid mlkem+ecdhe is better than mlkem alone given that mlkem is relatively new and given the recent sike and rainbow stories one should exercise caution? Am I wrong?

And indeed that's what nearly everyone uses for key exchange. (For auth, the tradeoff is very different.) You wouldn't know by reading his posts about how the NSA is buying everyone out, right?

What ¿? > NSA is now overtly paying for standardization of "ietf-tls-mlkem", a weakening of the much more sensible "ietf-tls-ecdhe-mlkem". I'm not a native, please someone explain to me that his thesis isn't that the NSA is buying out peoples to push a weaker alternative to hybrid.*

don't forget "procuring a doctorate for a plagiarist and rapist who isn't even competent to explain rsa without having his hand held", late 2010s/early 2020s

diabolical read in the year 2026 💀 also did that mofo plagiarist and rapist go straight to ~hell~ jail or still at large to this day?

Oh and That Guy is back on the tls list too

Improve your IETF experience 1000x with this ONE WEIRD TRICK! Awful men don't want you to know about it!!!

oh i did not know of that connection gtk noted

yeah djb and tanja lange were his advisors at eindhoven

My observation about at least those 2000s contributions is that we all would have been better off if it hadn’t taken 15+ years of running in circles with the old stuff before we bought in. Also, he usually pushes for simpler things so it’s meaningful when he pushes for more complex things.

I credit him with getting us to realize the importance of APIs defined at the bytes layer in the late 2000s, and yes it took 10 years to learn that lesson. But that was 20 years ago, and the new stuff is simple and bytes based and better than his stuff. Now he just pushes for his stuff.

I’m just worried about what the next lesson is that 10 years from now we’ll say it took 10 years to learn.

Oh, is this the case of "never meet your heroes" finally happening to me? DJB has done incredible things in the past, I have admired him for decades. I have no idea what he is like in real life. Better not to look, I suppose? 🤪

I'm not a cryptographer, but aren't hybrids as secure as the post-quantum only version? If that is the case, the post-quantum transition can still happen with hybrids, right?

1) yes, hybrid key exchange HAS SHIPPED, and he actually opposed and slowed down that one too (!!!), so it shipped before being published by the IETF 2) most critical crypto bugs are in software, and more complexity and more software are not zero risk, so the tradeoff is not obvious