So we all know NIST is being puppeteered by the NSA, specifically in regards to quantum-secure encryption, which means you probably can't use that in certain situations. What are non-14-eye governments doing with encryption? Does anyone have any interesting sources or names of algorithms or anything that can help in this regard?
damn I didn't realize china had their own TLS ciphers and everything, pretty neat. I haven't seen any substantive criticism of SM4 or its associated hashing function, etc.
Looking into it I found one or two fearmongering sources that go "this is chinese, the ietf only included it for compatibility, DONT USE IT", and a bunch of cryptanalysis papers, mostly from Chinese authors (but written in perfect english which is neat) that seem great but I don't have the expertise to evaluate them in any way.
given that SM4, etc were classified until 2006, a lot of what's cutting edge now is probably classified.
I did find this though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SM9_(cryptography_standard) which is pretty interesting. I don't know if it's completely novel encryption techniques or if it uses an existing cipher under the hood but regardless very interesting stuff