> Sometimes I ask myself if this generalized crypto mono-culture is something being implanted in our brain to spare NSA money. I’m in the industry - I work on

> Sometimes I ask myself if this generalized crypto mono-culture is something being implanted in our brain to spare NSA money. I’m in the industry - I work on cryptography research and I review cryptographic protocols for security and correctness. I can tell you when I warn people not to roll their own crypto it’s not because I’m shilling for the NSA. It’s really very simple. Cryptography is an extremely complex discipline that requires specialized training. For the most part, engaging in complex disciplines without the requisite training results in errors somewhere. Unlike software from many other such complex disciplines, cryptosystems are 1) safety critical, and 2) compromised by extremely minute errors in design or implementation. Speaking frankly, I don’t think it’s wise for you to try and develop your own machine learning software for a production system without training, either. But at least if you do that you’re not (likely) compromising your users. We admonish untrained engineers for doing the same with cryptography because it requires either great ignorance or great hubris to believe you can pull it off without disastrous errors along the way.