Getting high-grade security right is exceptionally hard. There's a saying about sex: make one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life. Sec

Getting high-grade security right is exceptionally hard. There's a saying about sex: make one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life. Security and cryptography are orders of magnitude worse. It's bad enough that errors compound, but it doesn't end there. You can have subtle and counter-intuitive failure modes where a single step outside the happy path is enough to completely annihilate the security of your system. I feel there is no analogy that could capture the absurd complexity and catastrophic failure potential. To give some background - I've been working with applied crypto since 90's, and professionally (on and off) since early 2000's. That experience is still next to worthless: I know for a fact that I am not good enough to actually implement anything that could withstand the attacks of a motivated and well-funded adversary. (Or even that of a bored PhD student.) The best I can do is find tools and components that have been battle hardened by the handful few exceptional professionals. At least that way my hubris shouldn't amount to too much damage.