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The way I recall it (and I wonder if you'll agree - you are certain to know much more about it than I do) Applied was sort of a cryptography Bible in the 90ies.

by anatoly 14y ago

The way I recall it (and I wonder if you'll agree - you are certain to know much more about it than I do) Applied was sort of a cryptography Bible in the 90ies. It filled a huge void when it appeared, and deserved the fame it acquired. It aged badly, but any book of its kind would; I don't think it or its author deserve the blame for people cluelessly continuing to rely on it in 2010s. To me, Applied places Schneider into a very separate category from ESR, whose open-source contributions actually were _very_ modest and not at all significant.

tptacek 14y ago
I differ from you in that I think it's fair to judge a book about cryptography for failing to establish the engineering principles required to use its concepts correctly; it would be like an algorithms book that recommended Bubble Sort, except worse because of the consequences of mistakes. So, for instance, you can leave _Applied Cryptography_ thinking that it's reasonable to use RSA to encrypt sporadic small semantically-meaningful messages, or to deploy a block cipher in ECB mode, or to base a protocol on Diffie Hellman without a trust anchor to break ties for MITM, or to fail to authenticate your ciphertext... and that's just the stuff you notice when you constrain your attention to the mainstream topics in the book, which obviously spends a whole lot of time touring marginal algorithms and protocols without providing clear signals about their unsuitability for deployment. Another way to look at it is that _Practical_ is a book that is fighting against developers building their own ad-hoc cryptosystems out of things like AES, and _Applied_ is a book that is fighting against developers building their own block ciphers. And if "not replacing AES" is the battle you're fighting, you're already totally screwed, I guess. When I think about Schneier's contributions to the field, _Applied_ and _Practical_ don't count; they're books, not papers. I'm suggesting instead that you look at his cite record. There's significant stuff there! But it's virtually always as part of teams of otherwise well-established cryptography researchers, and it's clearly not of the same kind as say Joan Daemen or Daniel Bleichenbacher or Don Coppersmith or Philip Rogaway. And I don't mean that in a "Schneier's no Rogaway" sense! † (or, at the time, IDEA and DES-EDE)

by anatoly 14y ago

tptacek 14y ago

I differ from you in that I think it's fair to judge a book about cryptography for failing to establish the engineering principles required to use its concepts correctly; it would be like an algorithms book that recommended Bubble Sort, except worse because of the consequences of mistakes. So, for instance, you can leave _Applied Cryptography_ thinking that it's reasonable to use RSA to encrypt sporadic small semantically-meaningful messages, or to deploy a block cipher in ECB mode, or to base a protocol on Diffie Hellman without a trust anchor to break ties for MITM, or to fail to authenticate your ciphertext... and that's just the stuff you notice when you constrain your attention to the mainstream topics in the book, which obviously spends a whole lot of time touring marginal algorithms and protocols without providing clear signals about their unsuitability for deployment. Another way to look at it is that _Practical_ is a book that is fighting against developers building their own ad-hoc cryptosystems out of things like AES, and _Applied_ is a book that is fighting against developers building their own block ciphers. And if "not replacing AES" is the battle you're fighting, you're already totally screwed, I guess. When I think about Schneier's contributions to the field, _Applied_ and _Practical_ don't count; they're books, not papers. I'm suggesting instead that you look at his cite record. There's significant stuff there! But it's virtually always as part of teams of otherwise well-established cryptography researchers, and it's clearly not of the same kind as say Joan Daemen or Daniel Bleichenbacher or Don Coppersmith or Philip Rogaway. And I don't mean that in a "Schneier's no Rogaway" sense! † (or, at the time, IDEA and DES-EDE)