From iang@iang.org Fri Jul 6 02:39:06 2018 From: ianG To: cypherpunks-legacy@lists.cpunks.org Subject: Re: [cryptography] ICIJ's project - comment on cryptography & tools Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2018 02:39:06 +0000 Message-ID: <172289283973.3881296.842677304149251412.generated@mail.pglaf.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="===============4135635390822527741==" --===============4135635390822527741== Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable On 8/04/13 04:06 AM, Peter Gutmann wrote: > "Kevin W. Wall" writes: > >> I think you're giving the NSA way too much credit on why security sucks. E= ven >> if we were to restrict 'security' to the scope of cryptography, even there= , I >> think the NSA has much less to do with dumbing down crypto security than >> other factors. > > Exactly. If the NSA didn't exist at all the only difference we'd notice is > that there'd be less of this weird obsession with ECDSA (via pressure to ad= opt > Suite B). Computer security as a whole wouldn't suck any less. I think we all suffer a fair amount of cognitive dissonance on this one. We all know stories. DES is now revealed as interfered with, yet for =20 decades we told each other it was just parity bits. The same process =20 happened to GSM -- MiBs specified the 40 bit key, but because it was a =20 secret design, they didn't need to create a legend to hide the 16 bits of=20 zeroes. Add in export control regs, add in the war against PRZ. If someone where to do a longitudinal study of the public knowledge of the=20 interference, I think it would mount up. Individually, we can ignore those=20 stories as conspiracy theory, but in aggregate, much harder. >> IMO, the biggest factor is that 95% or more of developers are completely >> ignorant of best practices in cryptography. > > At the other end of the scale, 99.9% of developers who do know security have > no idea how to create *usable* security. At the moment there are exactly t= wo > crypto-using products I can think of that I'd feel confident a random member > of the public could walk up and use, those being Skype and iMessage. This is the good news. I think the message has finally got through that =20 usability is more important than classical CIA, etc. > (Unfortunately to the crypto-purists they're not good enough because they're > MITM-able. You should be tunnelling SIP over OpenVPN, it's really easy, > here's a pointer to a list of links to 100-page discussion threads on web > boards for ways of doing this that may work sometimes). Yeah. This is a mystery to me, where did this crap come from? Although =20 it aligns perfectly with the geek mentality, other specialties in CS tend=20 to create a greater resistance to the guild mentality. I can't pin the=20 causality on it as yet. > Incidentally, the NSA is, from all the reports I've seen, even worse than we > are at making security usable. My favourite publication on security > usability, Laura Heath's "An Analysis of the System Security Weaknesses of = the > US Navy Fleet Broadcasting System, 1967-1974, as exploited by CWO John > Walker?", goes into this in more detail. A great read! An interference attack can be extremely high-leverage. Being good at it =20 can do a lot of damage. This however doesn't mean that one is any good at=20 defence. > Peter. > iang _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list cryptography(a)randombit.net http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography ----- End forwarded message ----- --=20 Eugen* Leitl leitl http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE --===============4135635390822527741==--