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> Solaris cryptographic framework team" believes something to be true is inadequate evidence for me. I don't follow - why would you believe that something is s

> Solaris cryptographic framework team" believes something to be true is inadequate evidence for me. I don't follow - why would you believe that something is secure despite the developers of it saying it is not? If you trust that they are competent, wouldn't you trust a competent cryptographer who says that their code is insecure? And if you don't trust that they are competent enough to make that evaluation, why would the assumption be that they are still somehow able to write secure code, even if they can't correctly identify it as such?

derefr 10y ago
In security, competence in securing things and level of paranoia about possible threats are pretty orthogonal. Someone can be very good on a ground level when it comes to following best practices to get crypto done, while also imagining all sorts of implausible threat scenarios without thinking them fully through that make them say that what they've done is "not enough." You can find such people outside of cryptography as well: for example, the parent (or bodyguard) who won't let their child (client) leave the house because of all the deadly things that happen every day to people who leave their houses. It's what happens when you combine a profession that relies on a certain amount of healthy anxiety, with an anxiety disorder.
- jboy55 10y ago
  Its kind of like asking a lawyer, "If I do X, will that prevent me from being sued?" The answer is always No, but they think about it for a few hours before they reply.
tptacek 10y ago
The cryptographic framework teams of operating system projects have not generally been great sources of authority on cryptographic engineering, which is a much narrower speciality than a lot of people think it is. That doesn't make them incompetent! The lawyer comparison is a telling one. I have a lawyer I work with on contract review that I think is amazing. But that doesn't mean he's my best source of wisdom about litigation, because litigation is a very specific speciality of law practice, and most lawyers don't do it. Just like the OS crypto developers, he has to know a lot of stuff about litigation to do his job, and I respect that. But that doesn't make him a litigator. The LRNG developers thought they were accomplishing something quite important with the /dev/random reseeding/blocking system. But as you've seen from the man page update, the consensus is, that thing they were trying to accomplish was in fact counterproductive.

derefr 10y ago

In security, competence in securing things and level of paranoia about possible threats are pretty orthogonal. Someone can be very good on a ground level when it comes to following best practices to get crypto done, while also imagining all sorts of implausible threat scenarios without thinking them fully through that make them say that what they've done is "not enough." You can find such people outside of cryptography as well: for example, the parent (or bodyguard) who won't let their child (client) leave the house because of all the deadly things that happen every day to people who leave their houses. It's what happens when you combine a profession that relies on a certain amount of healthy anxiety, with an anxiety disorder.

jboy55 10y ago
Its kind of like asking a lawyer, "If I do X, will that prevent me from being sued?" The answer is always No, but they think about it for a few hours before they reply.

tptacek 10y ago

The cryptographic framework teams of operating system projects have not generally been great sources of authority on cryptographic engineering, which is a much narrower speciality than a lot of people think it is. That doesn't make them incompetent! The lawyer comparison is a telling one. I have a lawyer I work with on contract review that I think is amazing. But that doesn't mean he's my best source of wisdom about litigation, because litigation is a very specific speciality of law practice, and most lawyers don't do it. Just like the OS crypto developers, he has to know a lot of stuff about litigation to do his job, and I respect that. But that doesn't make him a litigator. The LRNG developers thought they were accomplishing something quite important with the /dev/random reseeding/blocking system. But as you've seen from the man page update, the consensus is, that thing they were trying to accomplish was in fact counterproductive.