Subject: Re: [Curdle] Adoption

From: denis bider <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 20 Feb 2016 17:28:26 +0000

Paul Hoffman:

> Great: their recommendation is 128 bits even for secret material
> that has could lead to widespread death and destruction. Their
> recommendation for 192 work factor is for top secret,
> something that only people who work for governments
> who don't care about IETF standards care about.

As far as I can tell, this is not true. The new recommendations are for ALL classified material up to top secret; NOT starting from top secret.

It is an expressed goal of the recommendations to have a single set of standards for all levels of classified material up to top secret.

(For even higher levels, I believe they use non-public algorithms.)

denis

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From: Phillip Hallam-Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 20 Feb 2016 12:44:06 -0500

On Sat, Feb 20, 2016 at 12:28 PM, denis bider <[email-masked]> wrote:
> As far as I can tell, this is not true. The new recommendations are for ALL
> classified material up to top secret; NOT starting from top secret.
>
> It is an expressed goal of the recommendations to have a single set of
> standards for all levels of classified material up to top secret.
>

Since there are about a million people with a Top Secret clearance
including foreign nationals and anyone with a Top Secret clearance can
read any of that material unless it is further classified, Top Secret
isn't very secret at all.

The 'good stuff' is all Compartmentalized Sensitive Information (CSI).

https://www.nsa.gov/ia/programs/suiteb_cryptography/

The Suite B recommendation was that a 2^256 Work factor was required
for 'up to' Top Secret. P384 is considered to be sufficient for Top
Secret which suggests that NSA believe that ECDH is actually stronger
than the rough 'halve the bit length'.

We do too, if people recall, the reason we went for 448 over 521 or
512 was that Curve 448 exceeds the AES256 work factor.