> I read Schneier's & Ferguson's Practical Cryptography years ago I cannot take anyone who advocated MAC-then-Encrypt, in 2010, seriously (in the book Cryptogr

> I read Schneier's & Ferguson's Practical Cryptography years ago I cannot take anyone who advocated MAC-then-Encrypt, in 2010, seriously (in the book Cryptography Engineering: Design Principles and Practical Applications by Niels Ferguson, Bruce Schneier, Tadayoshi Kohno). The school of cryptography they subscribe to seems to be "crypto is black magic; this is tried and it works and it is pretty much secure because I feel it is secure; experience is everything; proofs can have bugs too" as opposed to a more principled, analytical, methodical, provable security. This is especially problematic in pedagogical contexts, because the learners, by definition, do not have much experience or calibrated feelings, so they'll be lost or have to copy the design decisions of the authors without taking into account the contexts or that they might be flat wrong. That approach indeed implies the natural advice to someone who wants to learn will be "don't try it at home".