[crazy][joke][wrong][old] ssl

Undescribed Horrific Abuse, One Victim & Survivor of Many gmkarl at gmail.com
Tue May 9 14:29:47 PDT 2023


commentary:

openssl appears messy, and one can tell this may have happened because
its construction was in conflict with the interests of others
(generally assumed to be government spy organizations suppressing
cryptography). a testament to this mess is the implementation of
quantum security in the fork at
https://github.com/open-quantum-safe/openssl , which appears to me to
worsen the mess.

there are alternatives to openssl, such as gnutls. i should understand
these, and i haven't learned much about them. it is likely they have
also suffered some disorganization. cryptography is both esoteric and
controversial. when many alternatives pop up it is apparent that
something is going a little wrong. it's of course also inspiring and
really great! and usually one of them is really well done.

the pattern has been happening with software systems nowadays. the
community is global and diverse and highly talented and censored to an
unknown degree, so.

when secure code is obscure, it means that not only do errors remain
within it, but it is much easier for rogue contributions to
intentionally insert usable errors.

this defense of usable errors has been highly visible in security
channels over the past couple decades. many mysterious voices arguing
for less paranoia around systems that generally have locks less than
twice the number of doors, nor on all of them.

regardless the domain of these things have a lot of poorly defended
side channels they contend with so it's kind of intense anyway.


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