Subject: Re: IAB statement on the RPKI.

From: [email-masked] (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:22:19 -0500 (EST)

> From: Dmitry Burkov <[email-masked]>

    > I think that it is not a constructive way to discuss this issue
    > following some conspiracy theories.

Understood, but at the same time there may be some value to being curious as
to why the Russian authorities have mandated the use of a local standard.

Is it just some sort of 'not invented here', or some other similar cause
(which is, I agree, not very interesting); or is there a desire to use a
different algorithm because there some sort of weakness to the standard
algorithm most countries are using, a weakness which has only been detected
by some entity somewhere in Russia?

Needless to say, if there _is_ such a weakness (and I am not saying there is,
this is a pure hypothetical), we'd all like to know, so we could switch to
something more secure (perhaps the GOST algorithm.. :-).

	Noel

---

From: Martin Rex <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:53:43 +0100 (MET)

> to why the Russian authorities have mandated the use of a local standard.

The problem is that the explanation given is so universal that
it can only be wrong.

There may be a mandate for specific algorithms for particular uses,
but it is completely unbelievable that it is _as_universal_as_stated_.

And since the problem that is quoted is a political or contractual
one, and _NOT_ a technical one, it makes no sense to discuss
technical solutions for a presumably completely misunderstood
political or contractual issue.

Pretty much all of the software from outside of russia contains
implementations of some cryptographic algorithms.  And a lot of
software uses these algorithms, i.e. most software vendors
(Microsoft, Unix players, Linux Distros and network gear (Cisco?)
use it for the distribution of their software.

> by some entity somewhere in Russia?

I assume it is the fear about backdoors.

They know that nobody else besides themselves was given the a chance
to plant back doors into their algorithms, for design flaws it is
a level playing field for all, and for attacks, they currently have
the same "nice" advantage that firefox has over MSIE with regards
to probability of attacks.  So from pure a risk management perspective
mandating GOST provides some benefit, in theory.

Their symmetric cipher with a blocksize of 64 bits and a key size
of 256 bits is less convincing (because of the small blocksize).

-Martin