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This guide is amazing. It's incredibly useful to be offered one happy path that lets non-experts (myself included) get started easily. BUUUUUT I can't help rea

This guide is amazing. It's incredibly useful to be offered one happy path that lets non-experts (myself included) get started easily. BUUUUUT I can't help reading these and being reminded of Vernor Vinge's "Net of a Million Lies", where people looking for shortcuts end up getting traps. We know that state actors have haunted academic and industry efforts to disseminate info and implementations of cryptography, inserting weaknesses -- resulting confusion is part of why we need guides like this. How do we know when we can trust a "new media" guide like this one? Can non-practitioners adopt tests that inexpensively verify validity of suggestions like these? Is HN (now with "fight me" threads!) state of the art social proof, or are there other ways to incentivize expert review (without exposing those same experts to centralized influence)? For clarity, I'm explicitly NOT suggesting this guide is a trap -- I sure has heck wouldn't know, but I don't think so and will be using it :) Just getting meta.

lmm 9y ago
I don't think HN is good enough. On the (rare) occasions when tptacek does post something wrong, it gets massively upvoted anyway because it's tptacek. (I've even seen posts that boil down to "don't you know who I am?" get upvoted) No-one is trustworthy enough to outsource the whole industry's security to - not tptacek, not djb, not AWS, and certainly not me. I think the key is to take not just the recipe but also the rationale. Someone who tells you "Don’t use RSA." might as well be working for the NSA. Someone who tells you "RSA has too many knobs. In modern curve systems, like Curve25519, everything is pre-set for security." is at least making a coherent argument that others can criticize - they might still be wrong, but the fact that they're being substantive is a positive step.
- 18pfsmt 9y ago
  I think the time to bring up erroneous posts, is in the thread in which they occur. And as long as we are talking "substantive," how about citing tptacek's incorrect posts instead making vague references? Even the dumbest of us know tptacek is not infallible, though I do hope cperciva and tptacek revisit this thread.
  - lmm 9y ago
    > I think the time to bring up erroneous posts, is in the thread in which they occur. And as long as we are talking "substantive," how about citing tptacek's incorrect posts instead making vague references? I did bring them up in the threads they occurred in. Not wanting to reopen those old discussions is precisely why I didn't talk about specific examples or give links.
lvh 9y ago
Surely HN counts as some form of public scrutiny. If all of us are compromised, then yeah, you're fucked. But we've tried not speaking up and telling people to leave it to the pros and we got like a decade of CBC padding oracle bugs so that didn't work out and now we're trying to at least give people a fighting chance to stay on our professional opinion of the straight and narrow. Disclaimer: I'm a co-editor of the new version of the document and also a principal at Latacora and therefore clearly an NSA stooge ;-)
- evrydayhustling 9y ago
  Yeah, I'm mostly thinking about about taking what works about HN and naming it or even extracting / concentrating it. Some thoughts about what that is: - individual views and reps - open to competing interests - signal / noise ratio All could be amplified.
Toast_25 9y ago
There are waaaayyyy easier and cheaper ways to get your private information than by a massive, distributed covert operation designed to make your encryption implementations slightly easier to brute-force.

lmm 9y ago

I don't think HN is good enough. On the (rare) occasions when tptacek does post something wrong, it gets massively upvoted anyway because it's tptacek. (I've even seen posts that boil down to "don't you know who I am?" get upvoted) No-one is trustworthy enough to outsource the whole industry's security to - not tptacek, not djb, not AWS, and certainly not me. I think the key is to take not just the recipe but also the rationale. Someone who tells you "Don’t use RSA." might as well be working for the NSA. Someone who tells you "RSA has too many knobs. In modern curve systems, like Curve25519, everything is pre-set for security." is at least making a coherent argument that others can criticize - they might still be wrong, but the fact that they're being substantive is a positive step.

18pfsmt 9y ago
I think the time to bring up erroneous posts, is in the thread in which they occur. And as long as we are talking "substantive," how about citing tptacek's incorrect posts instead making vague references? Even the dumbest of us know tptacek is not infallible, though I do hope cperciva and tptacek revisit this thread.
- lmm 9y ago
  > I think the time to bring up erroneous posts, is in the thread in which they occur. And as long as we are talking "substantive," how about citing tptacek's incorrect posts instead making vague references? I did bring them up in the threads they occurred in. Not wanting to reopen those old discussions is precisely why I didn't talk about specific examples or give links.

lvh 9y ago

Surely HN counts as some form of public scrutiny. If all of us are compromised, then yeah, you're fucked. But we've tried not speaking up and telling people to leave it to the pros and we got like a decade of CBC padding oracle bugs so that didn't work out and now we're trying to at least give people a fighting chance to stay on our professional opinion of the straight and narrow. Disclaimer: I'm a co-editor of the new version of the document and also a principal at Latacora and therefore clearly an NSA stooge ;-)

evrydayhustling 9y ago
Yeah, I'm mostly thinking about about taking what works about HN and naming it or even extracting / concentrating it. Some thoughts about what that is: - individual views and reps - open to competing interests - signal / noise ratio All could be amplified.

Toast_25 9y ago

There are waaaayyyy easier and cheaper ways to get your private information than by a massive, distributed covert operation designed to make your encryption implementations slightly easier to brute-force.