About the worst thing you could say about the NIST competitions is that if NSA knows some horrible flaw in CRYSTAL-KYBER, they're not going to tell us about it. But that's true of any other contest anybody else runs, too.
Why would that be true in any alternate versions of these contests? I understand the enormous incentive mechanisms involved, and yet I cannot see this being obviously true.
Edit to add: if the authorship of the submitters is as above reproach as we are led to assume, why can that not be the case for the NIST decision panel itself?
