Maybe It's Snake Oil All the Way Down

Lucky Green shamrock at cypherpunks.to
Mon Jun 2 22:13:00 PDT 2003


Ian Grigg wrote:
> 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.

ssh2 is in essence a re-invention of what SSL did without having to use
X.509 keys. This reinvention was, IMHO, largely the result of the
limitations of the ssh1 design.

> (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.)

I trust that we can agree that the volume of traffic and number of
transactions protected by SSL are orders of magnitude higher than those
protected by SSH. As is the number of users of SSL. The overwhelming
majority of which wouldn't know ssh from telnet. Nor would they know
what to do at a shell prompt and therefore have no use for either ssh or
telnet.

Given that SSL use is orders of magnitude higher than that of SSH, with
no change in sight, primarily due to SSL's ease-of-use, I am a bit
puzzled by your assertion that ssh, not SSL, is the "only really
successful net crypto system".

--Lucky





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