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> My advice: don't trust crypto at all outside of TLS, GPG/PGP, and SSH. And know that of those three systems, two were broken relatively recently. Good advice
by dublinclontarf 15y ago
> My advice: don't trust crypto at all outside of TLS, GPG/PGP, and SSH. And know that of those three systems, two were broken relatively recently.
Good advice, but they weren't broken, just mistakes in their implementation.
- tptacek 15y agoThat is first of all not true, and second of all not relevant. In both cases the cryptosystem itself had a design flaw. And in both cases the implementations of that cryptosystem, aside from the design flaws, had implementation flaws that made the design a moot point.
- yuhong 15y agoIt is still a good point though. Even using proven protocols, you can still make mistakes in the implementation. Using proven implementations is best.
- tptacek 15y agoI took his point to be the opposite: that the worst that seems to happen with cryptosystems is that implementations are broken. That bugged me on two levels: first, the idea that there haven't been terrible bugs in e.g. SSL3, and second that an implementation bug means "just upgrade OpenSSL", when it's more like "the discovery of buffer overflows and attendant years of chaos". I am jumpy about this topic, though.