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Crypto is complicated and very hard to do well. Hell, any complex software is hard to do well. There will always, always be bugs. While I am pissed off with so

by abhn 12y ago

Crypto is complicated and very hard to do well. Hell, any complex software is hard to do well. There will always, always be bugs. While I am pissed off with so much moaning, and do agree they should be better funded, I think it is more the case of sensationalist blogging taking control of the narrative. Rather than "Booo OpenSSL" we should focus on recovering and raising awareness of the projects we all rely on every day.

aggresswift 12y ago
Precisely! One large company I know has a technical review system which we use frequently to root cause failure and more importantly to update systems and workflows that will avoid the cockup being discussed in future. Blaming a team or oneself is not entertained (we don't care about the who), the important question is why and what can we do to fix it. In my opinion, I think the OpenSSL team should come up with such a document and a list of corrective countermeasures.
JackC 12y ago
> Crypto is complicated and very hard to do well. Hell, any complex software is hard to do well. There will always, always be bugs. There will always be bugs, sure, but differences in the engineering approach can result in orders-of-magnitude differences in the frequency of bugs. For example, see "Some thoughts on security after ten years of qmail 1.0," where the qmail author explained why he thought qmail had a dramatically different security track record than sendmail: http://cr.yp.to/qmail/qmailsec-20071101.pdf http://cr.yp.to/qmail/qmailsec-20071101.pdf The kind of things he's talking about can't just happen on the level of "more people submitting patches" and "more financial contributions." You need a top-down approach that's designed to produce secure code.
Timmmmmm 12y ago
Part of the reason people are annoyed it that this wasn't a complicated "crypto is hard" bug! It was a stupid, "really? again?" type bug that is typical of low-level badly written C programs and a common cause of security vulnerabilities.

by abhn 12y ago

aggresswift 12y ago

Precisely! One large company I know has a technical review system which we use frequently to root cause failure and more importantly to update systems and workflows that will avoid the cockup being discussed in future. Blaming a team or oneself is not entertained (we don't care about the who), the important question is why and what can we do to fix it. In my opinion, I think the OpenSSL team should come up with such a document and a list of corrective countermeasures.

JackC 12y ago

> Crypto is complicated and very hard to do well. Hell, any complex software is hard to do well. There will always, always be bugs. There will always be bugs, sure, but differences in the engineering approach can result in orders-of-magnitude differences in the frequency of bugs. For example, see "Some thoughts on security after ten years of qmail 1.0," where the qmail author explained why he thought qmail had a dramatically different security track record than sendmail: http://cr.yp.to/qmail/qmailsec-20071101.pdf http://cr.yp.to/qmail/qmailsec-20071101.pdf The kind of things he's talking about can't just happen on the level of "more people submitting patches" and "more financial contributions." You need a top-down approach that's designed to produce secure code.

Timmmmmm 12y ago

Part of the reason people are annoyed it that this wasn't a complicated "crypto is hard" bug! It was a stupid, "really? again?" type bug that is typical of low-level badly written C programs and a common cause of security vulnerabilities.