NSA: Still bound by laws of computational complexity

scottaaronson.com

11 points·clarkm··2 comments

"In cryptography, then, it’s not just for idle academic reasons that you’d like a publicly-available trail of research papers and source code, open to criticism and improvement by anyone, that takes you all the way from the presumed hardness of an underlying mathematical problem to the security of your system under whichever class of attacks is relevant to you."

Being open to criticism and improvement does not necessarily improve anything unless the people doing the review have the same level of knowledge as the people trying to leave exploitable flaws.

While what you say isn't false per se, there still is no better avenue of approach.

This is like the fifth time today that I'm seeing this sort of inward-looking anti-intellectual sentiment. Was there some dimwitted reddit thread that led to the consensus that since crypto is hard to understand, it's only for elites and shouldn't be trusted? Or that we should throw away the ideas that open development and the scientific method are our best tools for creating foundations for progress?

Or maybe these newly created accounts are just NSA psyops attempting to dissuade people away from the idea that the NSA can even be thwarted?

Sorry kids, these Snowden revelations are apparently hitting you quite hard as you'd resigned yourselves to trusting one of corporations, the government, or the populist mob and are shocked that the first two are colluding to undermine the third. But for those who've been analyzing security all along, this news is just confirmation of existing speculation and another opportunity to shout from the rooftops to convince people that security matters.

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