2 ms·
RSA quickly becomes a lot less elegant once you start patching in all the cracks. What I mean is that if you give an otherwise competent developer who is not a
by brl 17y ago
RSA quickly becomes a lot less elegant once you start patching in all the cracks.
What I mean is that if you give an otherwise competent developer who is not a cryptographer a description of the elegant version of the RSA algorithm and ask them to implement it and design a secure protocol what they come up with will be completely broken.
- ajross 17y agoSure. But to be honest, that point is kinda trivial, no? If you give any competent developer a hard problem in an area where they are not a domain expert and ask them to deliver a correct solution based on nothing but an elegant description of an algorithm, they're likely to fail. My point was this: it's easy from your perspective to complain about subtle practical details with stuff like RC4. But that obscures the fact that RC4 is an important algorithm, and worth studying. It's prudent to put on your expert hat and warn amateurs away from crypto stuff, but if they're going to study it, they should know about RC4.
- tptacek 17y agoIf, like you, they're going for a PhD in the subject, then yes. If, like me, they're faced with it in practice, then what they need to know is, "bad".