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Cryptography is a black, and white field. Either crypto algorithm is deemed 99.9999999999+% physically unbreakable, or anything less, and it doesn't work.
by baybal2 6y ago
Cryptography is a black, and white field. Either crypto algorithm is deemed 99.9999999999+% physically unbreakable, or anything less, and it doesn't work.
- elcomet 6y agoExcept that it's not true. Even proven mathematical algorithms can be breaked if not implemented correctly, or some side channels might be discovered along the way. It's not just black and white.
- baybal2 6y agoThis put an even more extreme emphasis on being on the paranoid side, and not leaving anything to the chance, not less.
- thu2111 6y agoThat's what you'd think. Read some advanced cryptography papers and you'll discover it's not quite that simple. There are the exotic hardness assumptions: are those mathematical problems really hard to solve or not? They aren't classical, natural problems like discrete log. Then there are the odd threat models, e.g. plenty of algorithms out there claim to be proven secure in the honest-but-curious model. Although this threat model isn't entirely naive, in the real business world "honest but curious" adversaries do appear in the imaginations of business leaders at least, but most people assume the point of cryptography is to keep you secure against arbitrarily malicious adversaries.