On: Let’s Encrypt Receives the Levchin Prize for Real-...

[rvnx]

What about the theory that the NIST encryption curves may be backdoored ?

If this is the case, if I would be the NSA I would strongly push for free cryptography, to make sure that only the US can decrypt the communications and have a strategic advantage.

[duskwuff → rvnx]

Let's Encrypt is a CA. Their involvement with web cryptography begins and ends with signing certificates which are used for authentication -- they have no say over what cryptography actually gets used for a TLS connection.

[rvnx → duskwuff]

It goes way beyond, since Let's Encrypt influence the ecosystem a lot and the standards that are used.

If you use Let's Encrypt, you are likely using Certbot, which means that everybody uses a tool that a central authority strongly recommends to you.

I wonder how they generate the key, for example, it may be using secp256r1: https://github.com/certbot/certbot/blob/5c111d0bd1206d864d7c... (this seems to be the default?)

Some time ago, I remember seeing secp256r1 in some tech talks like here: https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2018/08/21/a-tale-of-two-elli...

"The “k” in sepc256k1 stands for Koblitz and the “r” in sepc256r1 stands for random. A Koblitz elliptic curve has some special properties that make it possible to implement the group operation more efficiently. It is believed that there is a small security trade-off, that more “randomly” selected parameters are more secure. However, some people suspect that the random coefficients may have been selected to provide a back door."

If a solution is plausible, and this solution can bring dozens of billions of USD in in direct economic value or protect populations, certainly the smart people would/should think about a way to do it (and this could even be the right thing to do).

I'm not saying that Let's Encrypt is backdoored; what I'm saying is that it's a juicy target and that one potential solution to this problem is to encourage decentralization.

[slim → duskwuff]

They are concentrating authority which is never good

[duskwuff → slim]

> They are concentrating authority

Honestly, not by much. There are maybe half a dozen major CAs that make up the vast majority (95%+) of certificate issuance, and that number has been shrinking as poorly run CAs have been shut down (like GeoTrust) and other CAs have gone through cycles of acquisition (like Verisign/Symantec/DigiCert).

Besides, a lot of the market share which Let's Encrypt has acquired has been by expanding the market, rather than taking it from other players. Ten years ago, less than 25% of web traffic was encrypted; now, 80-90% of it is, and a lot of that growth has been through increased availability of free or low-cost certificates.