Phil Fraering writes:
Why are the arguments on either side so emotional?
I'm rather hesitant to jump into this thread, but I think that one reason is that Fred's concerns have been misunderstood a bit. (If I'm wrong, I'm sure he'll correct me.) It seems that there are many people who are ready to leap to the defense of the honor of the programmers behind PGP, when they feel said honor is being impugned. I get the impression (as much from what I know of his background as from what he's said) that Fred is at least as concerned about PGP being a correct implementation of the various algorithms it involves as he is about back doors inserted by nefarious individuals. As I understand it, it is impossible to demonstrate the correctness of any program the size of PGP. And it would also not be possible to validate the compiler or the operating system. One thing I'm not sure of, though, is this: Would it be possible to verify a much smaller program, say, the RSA-in-3-lines-of-Perl? (Of course, you still would be left trying to verify the Perl interpreter, and the OS again.) And is there any way to build trusted system out of small, verifiable pieces? Since the way they're connected could also be questioned, I suspect that when you put enough of them together it's just as bad as the case of a single, monolithic program. But this isn't my area, so I don't know. Would it be possible to formally verify at least some parts of a large program like PGP? And would that add to the trustworthiness of the overall program? (Keeping in mind Fred's earlier remark about a seemingly-unrelated portion of the code overwriting the key.) -- David R. Conrad, ab411@detroit.freenet.org, http://web.grfn.org/~conrad/ Finger conrad@grfn.org for PGP 2.6 public key; it's also on my home page Key fingerprint = 33 12 BC 77 48 81 99 A5 D8 9C 43 16 3C 37 0B 50 No, his mind is not for rent to any god or government.