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> You want tools designed to do one thing well, not one tool that offers a thin layer of getopt() over a low-level cryptography API. I want both. Different hig
by franga2000 4y ago
> You want tools designed to do one thing well, not one tool that offers a thin layer of getopt() over a low-level cryptography API.
I want both. Different higher-level crypto tools have different limitations, whereas OpenSSL can do absolutely anything I could ever want. When I'm trying to get BouncyCastle, PyCrypto and whatever library that random IoT device that I need to reverse engineer uses to play nicely together, I need a tool that can work with all of them. There are so many weird extensions and optional parts of the standards that I need to configure just right and no high-level tools expose all of them.
Sometimes you just need to generate a key or check a cert and for that, high-level tools are far better. But sometimes you need to do something in just the right way because of reasons outside of your control and in that case, you need to have every single one of those options and switches at your disposal.