I recently spoke with Joan Daemen and wow, he was far from advocating for them... So we had our fun with nist pqc, and now it's not in our hands anyway and we can go back to propose new/healthier designs. (Look at the progress in signatures for example) 2/

In a way Dan is helping the community to go back to a new healthy innovation phase. (Modulo involving people accusing others of taking bribes...) The post is tragic for many reasons, but (for me) it's more organizations/companies/ crypto advocates that should worry. 3/

There is an intersection between those and researchers but it's not an equality And from a scientific pov, I am only worried about someone in my field accusing the others of being corrupt Or we should worry for all standards that did not go through a thorough scientific review

But there is also a major diff. I'm not in the US... so what the nist says is not everything that will secure stuff here. It's "just" what the US will push, but we already see some OS project doing other things (ntru+) There are also french things that are moving toward hqc (😥)

The process is concerning on two levels. On a scientific level it’s an abuse of the scientific infrastructure. Accusing your colleagues and research competitors of academic malfeasance, insinuating that they were bribed. Bullying people and calling them out in public. 1/

This is present in the current post. But here’s another example. If this is what’s happening *in public* then I can only imagine what kind of abuses are happening in private. blog.cr.yp.to/20220129-plagi… 2/

Dan once threatened to sue me and a set of colleagues (naming Github as a party in order to maximize costs) over a disagreement on author order and publication timing. This stuff is way out of bounds. Science cannot happen in that environment. 3/

So bluntly I have no idea if the PQC competition is going to be able to achieve its scientific purpose in that environment. I don’t know if there’s an open environment for scientific collaboration and criticism, and if there isn’t: that’s a catastrophe. 4/

(PS just because you haven’t heard about it does not mean it isn’t happening. This is the first time I’ve spoken publicly about the lawsuit threat two tweets up.) 5/

More generally: I hate standards bodies. I’ve written particularly about how much I hate NIST and FIPS and the ANSI/ISO processes, and how all of that led to things like Dual EC. And even aside from suborned crypto I’ve also written about how terrible most standards are. 6/