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The overall message is: I trust human intelligence -- and this is positive (iff you're actually using your intelligence). In contrast, most crypto rants fall i
by polos 17y ago
The overall message is: I trust human intelligence -- and this is positive (iff you're actually using your intelligence).
In contrast, most crypto rants fall into the "laugh at them, as they're all equally stupid" trap, which is not going to change humans into better...
- tptacek 17y agoIf you're trained and experienced, there is probably nothing about performing standard appendectomy to challenge the intellect. But you're crazy if you think that optimism about human intelligence is enough to allow an ordinary smart person --- or maybe even an ER nurse --- to conduct one based on a guidebook.
- by 17y agoThere are things to be learned from the article at more levels than just the design of new protocols. For example, I would say this good advice that applies to ordinary smart people: "Do NOT store users' passwords. Do NOT hash them with MD5. Use a real key derivation algorithm. PBKDF2 is the most official standard; but scrypt is stronger. Please keep in mind that even if YOUR application isn't particularly sensitive, your users are probably re-using passwords which they have used on other, more sensitive, websites -- so if you screw up how you store your users' passwords, you might end up doing them a lot of harm."