[127300] in cryptography@c2.net mail archive
Re: Strength in Complexity?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (James A. Donald)
Wed Jul 2 19:06:03 2008
Date: Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:45:49 +1000
From: "James A. Donald" <jamesd@echeque.com>
CC: arshad.noor@strongauth.com, cryptography@metzdowd.com
In-Reply-To: <E1KDpqw-0002GO-AY@wintermute01.cs.auckland.ac.nz>
Peter Gutmann wrote:
> For most crypto protocols, usability is job #8,107,
> right after "did we get the punctuation right in the footnotes for the third
> appendix?".
Usability disasters such as DNSSEC are more common than strictly
cryptographic disasters such as wifi. DNSSEC is near impossible to use
correctly end to end.
Usually a cryptographic system is very difficult to use correctly, or to
use incorrectly - as for example various VPN products.
Sometimes a cryptographic system is easy to use incorrectly, difficult
to use correctly, for example https and pretty much everything built on
top of tls-ssl (old flame, never resolved, as to whether this is an
inherent design flaw in the very concept of a cryptographic layer and
any product that uses layering to factorize out the cryptographic code)
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