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> The (generally correct) mindset is don't implement your own crypto That sounds like bad advice. The huge impact of Heartbleed is precisely because of the mon
by bad_user 13y ago
> The (generally correct) mindset is don't implement your own crypto
That sounds like bad advice. The huge impact of Heartbleed is precisely because of the monoculture in SSL/TLS implementations. Shit happens but this vulnerability is such a catastrophe because an estimated half a million of the top Internet websites have been vulnerable since 2012, including popular services that everybody is using and the vulnerability once discovered, is easy to use and far reaching, allowing one to steal sessions, passwords, the domain's private keys and anything important.
It really can't get any worse than this. At the very least we found out about it, better late than never and we can discuss the source-code, but it does make one wonder ... if SSL/TLS is such an important piece of infrastructure and if we need a monoculture (because apparently it's bad advice to reimplement crypto), why aren't we using a library that's the reference and that's peer reviewed by a standards committee, instead of relying on a library for which commits don't necessarily trigger sounds?
- betterunix 13y agoThe reason we tell people not to implement their own crypto is that no matter how skilled someone is, no matter what language they program in, it is nearly certain that self-rolled crypto code will have security flaws. Cryptographic security hinges on key, subtle assumptions that are very easy to screw up. World famous cryptographers do not roll their own crypto (except for research code). When people do implement cryptography they rely on having large numbers of other people review it. That is not a model that scales to having a large number (more than a couple dozen) of competing implementations.