I recommend this video by Computerphile - He talks about how NIST may have been pressured into enforcing compromised (backdoored?) cryptography methods as a standard - Dual_EC_DRBG to be exact. He also gives a super cool/intuitive breakdown on how this came to be. It will definitely grow some food for thought.
Small summary, courtesy of Wikipedia which makes a stronger claim than "may have been pressured":
> In September 2013, both The Guardian and The New York Times reported that NIST allowed the National Security Agency (NSA) to insert a cryptographically secure pseudorandom number generator called Dual EC DRBG into NIST standard SP 800-90 that had a kleptographic backdoor that the NSA can use to covertly predict the future outputs of this pseudorandom number generator. [...] the NSA worked covertly to get its own version of SP 800-90 approved for worldwide use in 2006. The whistle-blowing document states that "eventually, NSA became the sole editor".
1. Pretend to be someone else and enter a backdoored algorithm. Or pressure someone to enter a backdoored algorithm for you. Or just give them the algorithm for the reward of being the winner.
You think someone is going to pretend to be Chris Peikert and submit a backdoored construction as him, and that's going to work?
This is the problem with all these modern NIST contest theories. They're not even movie plots. Your last bit, about them paying someone like Peikert off, isn't even coherent; they could do that with or without the contest.
It's not the contest so much as the reputation of the winning team and the reputations of all the teams who did cryptanalytic work. Wait, I guess that means it is the contest. Well, there's your answer.
People on threads like these are pretending NIST was a shadowy force making secret determinations, but the whole thing happens in the open, and NIST is essentially just proctoring.
A lot of this kind of thing is just people telling on themselves that they don't follow the field and don't trust any cryptography not done by one of the three cryptographers they've ever heard of.
>the reputation of the winning team and the reputations of all the teams who did cryptanalytic work
>NIST is essentially just proctoring
Well, there we go. These items are actually good information (to be verified of course). Way better information than questions that seem to miss the concern. Thank you.
Your question presupposes a claim that the selection process is compromised. I'm not saying it is. I just wonder how we know it's not.
In NIST's position one could analyze the submissions for vulnerabilities to closely held (non-public) attacks, then select submissions having those vulnerabilities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nybVFJVXbww