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Also it's called "Crypto Experts," which in this particular field somehow pegs my contrarian indicator button. If they'd claimed to have designed a modern alte
by api 11y ago
Also it's called "Crypto Experts," which in this particular field somehow pegs my contrarian indicator button.
If they'd claimed to have designed a modern alternative to SSL using modern crypto primitives that's one thing. That's hard and requires solid crypto and coding knowledge and I wouldn't trust it without a lot of peer review, but it's something a competent crypto-understanding developer could pull off. Ordinary mortals can do things like combine a cipher with an authentication algorithm correctly if they take the time to study the state of the art and avoid previously understood pitfalls.
That's using crypto as a developer. But this is making crypto.
Creating a new cryptographic primitive is serious deep ninja-god black magic voodoo stuff that is beyond mere mortals... and this is coming from someone who is very anti-elitist when it comes to most things like this. There's not a huge pool of people I'd trust to attempt it, and even if it came from someone like DJB I still wouldn't use it until it's been in publication for at least a few years and attacked by many Ph.D's and others. Salsa and ChaCha are some of the newest ciphers in common use and those are now... what... a decade old? And they've been beat up pretty badly by researchers too, so they've passed enough of a gauntlet to be trusted with something.
So even if they did this new curve, I wouldn't use it for at least 5-10 years.
Edit:
The other thing I really don't get is why a new venture like this would start off by trying to push an entire new curve. Unless there is some good reason not to trust C25519, there are many other more pressing concerns in the crypto world that could be tackled. We could really use good end-user crypto software that is solidly engineered and offers good UX. That would be of immensely more value than yet another ECC curve with no clear benefit over existing curves. (Other than maybe NIST but that's another matter.)
- baby 11y agoCryptoexperts must be one of the most impressive research and consulting private company that I know of (in Cryptography). Antoine Joux and Pascal Paillier are there...
- tptacek 11y agoCryptoExperts is for real. But the Million Dollar Curve seems gimmicky.
- jethro_tell 11y agoIf I have a very large setup that does a lot of crypto, is there not a chance that this can save me a shit ton in cpu cycles? One of the main reasons that admins didn't turn on crypto by default until the snowden leaks was because of the CPU overhead on the servers. (I don't know in google's case but that's when they turned it on) It's not hard to imagine that if I was doing a lot of crypto (or a lot of connections) that strong efficient crypto would be on my list of things to keep track of.
- tptacek 11y agoNo, the $1MM curve will cost you CPU cycles. If you want a fast curve, use 25519.
- Taniwha 11y agoI think the attitude that rolling your own crypto "is serious deep ninja-god black magic voodoo stuff that is beyond mere mortals" has a lot to do with why we've been blythly taking NSA's deliberately broken crap. While I know it's hard, very hard, we shouldn't be discouraging people from making up new stuff, let a thousand flowers bloom around the NSA's walled garden .... what we should be doing is getting rigorous about testing and verification of new crypto be it from the NSA or the good guys
- __jal 11y agoI don't think anyone wants to discourage people from learning about, playing with, and trying to invent new crypto. The usual problem here is that people new to crypto frequently don't treat their whizzy new supercool algorithm as a toy that has almost certainly been done, cracked, improved, cracked and eventually abandoned. For whatever reason, it is entirely too easy for people new to crypto to convince themselves they've made a really cool discovery. There's even a cliche for this: "Anyone can create an crypto algorithm that they themselves cannot crack." Absolutely, learn, play, and try to make something great. But keep perspective. You wouldn't invite your loved ones to be the first to test your first attempt at a home-brew parachute; similarly, don't use your home-brew crypto to protect important things.
- tptacek 11y agoWe should put this part of the thread to bed, because CryptoExperts is the real deal, and it's kind of silly to debate "homebrew crypto" on a thread about their research.