Re: [Cfrg] Requesting removal of CFRG co-chair

[Tao Effect <[e-mail]>]

Replying to myself:

On Dec 23, 2013, at 7:16 PM, Tao Effect <[e-mail]> wrote:
> Given #3, I decided to do a quick google search for "Kevin Igoe". I couldn't find anything on him (at least none of the results seemed relevant).
> 
> Let me preface the following by saying that I'd never heard of Kevin before I saw Trevor's proposal cross my news feed, but it seems to me that with so much public scrutiny on one person, you'd think that person would feel pressured into making some sort of statement in defense of themselves.
> 
> Since this has not happened (yet), and Google couldn't answer my questions, I'll awkwardly ask this list: is Kevin Igoe a real person? Like, is that his real name? Where is the evidence?

I did some more searching, and am still quite puzzled:

- Kevin is introduced as co-chair with primary credentials as having "led the design of the SHA-1 hash algorithm."
- The wiki page on SHA1 doesn't have his name
- The first reference on the wiki [1] does not have his name
- Googling "Kevin Igoe NIST" resulted in other documents, but no significant info on who Kevin actually is could be found.

Earliest reference to "Kevin Igoe NSA" is a single document that claims to be from 1996, where his name appears once in the acknowledgments. [2]

Next earliest (that I could find) is from 2009, where he again, is only listed in the acknowledgements. [3]

Seems like a pretty shoddy basis to make an employee of the NSA co-chair of the CFRG. [4] At this point I'm still wondering whether this is a real name. Seems like it was inserted over the years to a bunch of acknowledgement sections, and that's it.

Cheers
Greg

[1] http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/fips/fips180-4/fips-180-4.pdf
[2] https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/money/nsamint/nsamint.htm
[3] http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5656
[4] bs

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