3 ms·
Calling it the default mode sounds a bit risky, if one assumes that defaults are secure.
by Retr0id 3y ago
Calling it the default mode sounds a bit risky, if one assumes that defaults are secure.
- tptacek 3y agoThe implication, of course, is that the defaults in cryptography are rarely secure.
- Retr0id 3y agoThat seems like something we should to try to fix, rather than lean into
- tptacek 3y agoGood luck! The reality is that this was a lot more relevant 10 years ago; today, new code is much more likely to use GCM or Chapoly than to generically compose a cipher mode with (hopefully) an authenticator.
- Retr0id 3y agoCryptography libraries etc. are moving towards exposing AEAD modes by default, so doesn't that make it even more weird to call ECB a default mode?
- tptacek 3y agoIt does. I'm not saying it's not a weird me thing. It was a better rhetorical dunk back when people were rolling their own message encryption; then it served as a kind of warning that if you just took the library defaults and the simplest path to getting your code working, you'd end up with something totally insecure.
- hinkley 3y agoIs there a legitimate reason to use it? Or is this a backward compatibility thing that nobody has made a fuss about? Sounds more like a foot gun to me.
- magicalhippo 3y agoPerhaps call it the dumb mode, as in it's not doing anything more clever than straight application, and it's dumb to use it like that...