[39489] in Cypherpunks
Re: "Hackers"-- brief review and anecdote...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Daniel C. Cotey)
Tue Sep 19 17:32:37 1995
Date: Tue, 19 Sep 1995 14:49:43 -0600 (MDT)
From: "Daniel C. Cotey" <dccotey@eclat.uccs.edu>
To: "Rev. Mark Grant" <mark@unicorn.com>
Cc: cypherpunks@toad.com
In-Reply-To: <Pine.3.89.9509191823.A881-0100000@unicorn.com>
On Tue, 19 Sep 1995, Rev. Mark Grant wrote:
>
> If it wasn't for ITAR the Net would already have secure encryption and
> authentication, and most such hacker attacks would be impossible (or at
> least impractical).
>
As someone who has hacked a little I would say that sloppy coding
(much like netscape's) has helped hackers far more than lack of
encryption. Imagine for a moment if sun had included some form of
encryption (maybe in nfs ?) in sunos 4.x.x, would it have been
effective if it had as many holes as sendmail, etc.. ?
Good algorithms well coded will hurt hackers. Good algorithms
slopply coded will simply provide hackers with one more toy to abuse,
while giving average people a false since of security (but you SAID it
was strong crypto, so why did they get my credit card number ?)
pUFF
