Maybe It's Snake Oil All the Way Down

Ian Grigg iang at systemics.com
Mon Jun 2 07:09:06 PDT 2003


A lot of the tools and blocks are too hard to
understand.  "Inaccessible" might be the proper
term.  This might apply to, for example, SSL,
and more so to IPSec.  These have a lower survival
rate, simply because as developers look at them,
their eyes glaze over and they move on.  I heard
one guy say that "you can read SSH in an hour
and understand what's going on, but not SSL."

(This was the point raised by the chap who
recently wanted to role his own from a pouch
of fine cut RSA.)

Also, a lot of cryptosystems are put together
by committees.  SSH was originally put together
by one guy.  He did the lot.  Allegedly, a fairly
grotty protocol with a number of weakneses, but
it was there and up and running.  And SSH-2 is
apparantly nice, elegant and easy to understand,
now that it has been fixed up.

(SSH is the only really successful net crypto
system, IMHO, in that it actually went into its
market and made a mark.  It's the only cryptosystem
that is as easy to use as its non-crypto competitor,
telnet.  It's the only one where people switch and
never return.)

PGP was also mildly successful, and was done by
one guy, PRZ.  The vision was very clear.  All others
had to do was to fix the bugs...  Sadly, free versions
never quite made the jump into GUI mail clients, so
widespread success was denied to it.

I'd say that conditions for Internet crypto system
success would include:

  1.  One guy, or one very small, very close team.

  2.  The whole application is rolled out, ready to use.

  3.  Crypto is own-rolled, tuned to the application.

  4.  Concentrate on the application, not the crypto.

  5.  The application meets a ready need, and

  6.  The app is easy to use.

  7.  User doesn't need to ask anyone's permission.

These aren't very strong indicators of success, if
only because there have been so few fires, for so
much smoke.

Counterexamples are speakfreely, which was again
one lone hacker (John Walker?).  Maybe it stalled
on latter points.  (One doesn't hear much about
crypto phones these days.  Was this really a need?)

My own "interested" protocol (SOX, done by Gary H,
not me) trys to meet the above criterion and hasn't
succeeded, like all other money protocols.  I leave
speculation on why success is still just around the
corner to others :-)



So, I'm with Scott on that.  When it comes down
to it, there's an awful lot of smoke, and precious
little real life crypto success out there.  It's
no wonder that people roll their own.

-- 
iang

---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at metzdowd.com





More information about the cypherpunks-legacy mailing list