8 ms·

I'm confused by your messages linked by DJB. You say that better cryptographers would not choose hybrids, which seems to say that you should indeed think that h

by eis 1mo ago

I'm confused by your messages linked by DJB. You say that better cryptographers would not choose hybrids, which seems to say that you should indeed think that hybrids are not a good choice. Then you say you are not such a good cryptographer and would choose a hybrid. But if you know that more senior cryptographers think they are not the right choice then why choose them anyways? Or am I misreading "cryptography-literate" here? Can you explain a bit more regarding your statement that DJB's POV on the matter has no broad support amongst his peers? I'm not in the field but Bernstein seemed like a highly respected member with a long track record in the crypto community, at least from the outside. Do you think the community is wrong or is it DJB who's wrong and why? There's also a good chance that I totally missed the argument being made.

tptacek 1mo ago
I can think of several academic cryptographers (or rather, practitioners with doctorates) who think the hybrid/pure thing is silly. I didn't claim that a majority oppose hybrids. The point of the message he snipped from the HN thread is that pure MLKEM is not considered an unserious design by actual cryptographers (people on the HN thread --- generally not cryptographers, like me --- think it is). Cryptography engineers tend to default to hybrids. Downthread we develop more clarity about what it is Bernstein is actually in an argument about. It isn't hybrids vs. pure!
- timschmidt 1mo ago
  I can think of academic practitioners with doctorates who had wildly disastrous opinions about their field of expertise too: Peter Duesberg, a Ph.D. in molecular biology / retrovirology who taught at Berkley and was a member of the National Academy, who maintained that HIV does not cause AIDS and that antiretroviral drugs do more harm than good. Walter Freeman, M.D. academic neurologist and first chair of neurology at George Washington University who believed that severing frontal-lobe connections could stabilize personality and stop pathological cycles of thought. Charles B. Davenport, Ph.D. in biology, geneticist and founder of the Eugenics Record Office. Henry H. Goddard, Ph.D. in psychology, intelligence-testing researcher and later professor of abnormal psychology who believed intellectual disability, poverty, prostitution, and criminality constituted a hereditary family type. Clarence Cook Little, Harvard Ph.D., mammalian geneticist and prominent cancer researcher who insisted for years that the evidence did not establish a causal relationship between smoking and lung cancer. Fun game. We could laugh at all of them, and your examples too, if not for the damage they caused.

by eis 1mo ago

tptacek 1mo ago

I can think of several academic cryptographers (or rather, practitioners with doctorates) who think the hybrid/pure thing is silly. I didn't claim that a majority oppose hybrids. The point of the message he snipped from the HN thread is that pure MLKEM is not considered an unserious design by actual cryptographers (people on the HN thread --- generally not cryptographers, like me --- think it is). Cryptography engineers tend to default to hybrids. Downthread we develop more clarity about what it is Bernstein is actually in an argument about. It isn't hybrids vs. pure!

timschmidt 1mo ago
I can think of academic practitioners with doctorates who had wildly disastrous opinions about their field of expertise too: Peter Duesberg, a Ph.D. in molecular biology / retrovirology who taught at Berkley and was a member of the National Academy, who maintained that HIV does not cause AIDS and that antiretroviral drugs do more harm than good. Walter Freeman, M.D. academic neurologist and first chair of neurology at George Washington University who believed that severing frontal-lobe connections could stabilize personality and stop pathological cycles of thought. Charles B. Davenport, Ph.D. in biology, geneticist and founder of the Eugenics Record Office. Henry H. Goddard, Ph.D. in psychology, intelligence-testing researcher and later professor of abnormal psychology who believed intellectual disability, poverty, prostitution, and criminality constituted a hereditary family type. Clarence Cook Little, Harvard Ph.D., mammalian geneticist and prominent cancer researcher who insisted for years that the evidence did not establish a causal relationship between smoking and lung cancer. Fun game. We could laugh at all of them, and your examples too, if not for the damage they caused.