On Mon, Nov 09, 2009 at 06:58:51PM +0000, John Case wrote:
All well and good, but who among us is running a straight "a.out" compilation of _only_ DES (or AES or whatever) such that our threat model is simply the validity of the pure algorithm ?
I sure am not. Whether it be SSH or SSL or duplicity or Tor, we're all using cryptosystems that most certainly receive far too much credit simply by virtue of being "open source".
Open source is only useful if _you_ open it - and maybe not even then. Youngs point is, what do you know about who is writing or reading or proofing it ?
Open source should indeed be a requirement - nobody here would argue against it. But it's never an assurance - especially not with a big project like OpenSSH and so on ...
When figuring out things, you'll typically take the path of least resistance. So you typically don't have to deal with breaking the cryptosystem. -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> 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