my take on "PCP"

[M Taylor]

On Mon, May 05, 2003 at 08:47:42AM -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> 
> Ralf Senderek <ralf at senderek.de> writes:
> > On 4 May 2003, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> > 
> > > If you are serious, submit a full description of your hash function
> > > along with your evidence of its security against known forms of attack
> > > to a peer-reviewed publication.
> > 
> > And fortunately my seriousness does not at all depend on the fact
> > whether or not I managed to get it into your favourite crypto journal.
> > Not seeing it in print will never prevent further analysis.
> 
> Actually, it effectively will prevent it because no one will
> bother. There's a great essay by Schneier on that subject.

To clarify, whether Ralf is serious is not an issue, whether serious peer 
review occurs is. 

"Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can 
create an algorithm that he himself can't break. It's not even hard. What 
is hard is creating an algorithm that no one else can break, even after 
years of analysis."
-- from "Memo to the Amateur Cipher Designer" by Bruce Schneier
<http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-9810.html#cipherdesign>

PCP is an interesting idea, but that does not imply that is it a wise
design goal. I think I would work on the User Interface issues before
expecting users to "understand cryptography" before using it. The
current state of the art is still just hard to use correctly for average 
computer users. See "Why Johnny Can't Encrypt"
<http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~alma/johnny.pdf>



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