Trevor Perrin requests removal of NSA from IETF Crypto Review
Two things you did not know before this post but know now:<p>* The IETF has a dedicated crypto review board, the CFRG, which approves or pokes holes in the cryptography used by other IETF standards.<p>* The chair of the IETF CFRG is an NSA employee (Kevin Igoe, one of the authors of the SHA1 hash standard).<p>I just learned these things a couple weeks ago. I am not generally a believer in the theory that NSA actively subverts Internet standards†. But even I think that it's crazy for an NSA employee to chair the CFRG.<p><i>In case you're wondering: Trevor Perrin is widely respected professional cryptographer. Most cryptographers work for university math departments. Perrin worked for years as a staffer for Paul Kocher, the godfather of side channel attacks, at Cryptography Research. He's the designer of the new forward secrecy ratchet for OTR (Axolotl) and the TACK TLS extension, and a behind-the-scenes contributor to other IETF crypto standards. Perrin wrote the pure-Python "tlslite" TLS implementation. If you were to draw a "family tree" of crypto know-how in the software security profession, a surprisingly huge chunk of it would be rooted in Perrin (and Nate Lawson and Kocher); for instance, virtually every modern TLS break came from ideas that Perrin popularized. 64 current Matasano Crypto Challenges, probably 50 of them I can trace to Perrin and Lawson.</i> Trevor Perrin is someone you should pay attention to.<p>† <i>(my best guess is that the standards NSA was actively subverting were about international telephony; subverting the IETF is a little like subverting the Linux kernel --- doable, but bad tradecraft)</i>