Hacker News Reader

Comment by antirez | Hacker News Reader

The root problem is that cryptography is not usable without some understanding. In the latest days we developed an addiction for "best practices" like "use bcrypt", "use /dev/random" or alike which in the field of cryptography are not enough: understanding is the only possible path. Actually, this is true for most things, it just shows up more obviously in the field of cryptography because of the security concerns. So we should replace "use bcrypt" with "Read Applied Cryptography & other books".

View on HN

The average guy doesn't have the time to read enough about cryptography to have the sort of knowledge you're wanting. This very article debates an understanding created by incomplete and poor cryptographic knowledge.

If there's anything I've learned by studying cryptography, it's that the average person needs to invest significant resources to become a pseudo-expert in cryptography - all before they can make any meaningful decision.

Applied Cryptography is not a terribly good starting point for cryptographic understanding these days. That's just another facet of difficulty: where does one even start? Do you want a theoretical baseline understanding? Do you want the high-level, quick-and-dirty overview which only gives a summary? (That'll make it hard to make real, informed decisions...)

If we really want to make cryptography accessible to many developers, the best solution is for the cryptographic community to make our libraries and interfaces better. At the same time, there comes a point where a developer has to stop and say "this is beyond what is standardized in ${widely used library}; we need to hire a cryptographer." In that sense, we need to instill a better anti-crypto ethic.

Basically to become an expert cryptographer you need a math degree and ten years of experience, so this is out of question indeed. What I'm referring to is to get enough information in order to understand the big picture: what is a stream cipher, what a block cipher, a cryptographic hash function and its main properties, how many of those primitives are kinda equivalent sometimes and you can use one to create another, the tradeoff between speed and security (and how number of rounds effect the security of crypto building blocks), analyzing simple algorithms in order to really understand why it is so hard for you to create something secure, secure PRNG generation and weak PRNG generation (and how to break a congruential linear generator), algorithms like DH, RSA, basic knowledge on number theory, and so forth. This will not make you an expert, but will give you enough understanding in order to actually undetstand why a rule or a best practice is used and when it is safe or not to break it.

About starting point, this is incredibly sad but true: there is no Applied Cryptography of 2015. The book is at this point in some way outdated and no replacement exists, however what you can do is to read it, and then to read the documents that there are around to get updated information. Also there are now the online courses on cryptography that really help. This may look like an overkill, but at this point crypto is everywhere and is the foundation of most things secure, so it is a requirement of everybody involved with computer security.

Well, this is the point of nacl (and successors). You don't need to know that it's using a stream cipher. You only need to know you want to send a secret, and this is the function that does that.

How secret is it? How much effort do you want an adversary to spend vs. your intended recipient. How do you want to manage keys between yourself and the recipient? What is the size of the secret? How much do you trust the channels over which you are sending the message? Do you need to validate the identity of the secret's recipient? How many secrets do you need to send to how many recipients each minute?

All of these influence how the secret should be bundled up and sent, and it takes more than a library to pick the appropriate method.

OK, I admit, if you like you can make it much harder than it needs to be.

The average person doesn't have the time needed to learn how to build a house, either. As a society, we solve this problem by delegating the construction industry to a group of people who specialize in it, and whom we can trust to do things properly.

There's no way around the fact that security is complex. If it's too time consuming for the average developer, then they shouldn't be doing it at all.

I think for ordinary programmers, stories of failures might be more effective. Case studies, perhaps even a bit embellished to make them more compelling. Something along the lines of Kurzweil's cuckoo's egg. Except shorter and more recent.

I think what you're getting at is a specific technology won't save you, it's the security mindset that's needed. Convincing programmers there really are bad people who want to pick apart your systems is the problem. Once their convinced, once they take security seriously, they'll do better.

They might start out doing a terrible job, but with the security mindset, they'll improve. They'll seek out problems and solve them. Rather than pretending it's not an issue, or blindly apply security secret sauce like "use bcrypt"

What is Kurzweil's cuckoo's egg

Do you perhaps mean Cliff Stoll?

Yes! My pre coffee memory failed me. Thanks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com