Do Cryptographers burn?

[Hadmut Danisch]

Hi,

this is not a technical question, but a rather
academic or abstract one: 

Do Cryptographers burn?

Cryptography is a lot about math, information theory, 
proofs, etc. But there's a certain level where all this
is too complicated and time-consuming to follow all those
theories and claims. At a certain point cryptography is based
on trusting the experts. Is anyone here on this list who can 
claim to have read and understood all those publications 
about cryptography? Is anyone here who can definitely tell
whether the factorization and discrete logarithm problems 
are hard or not? Today's cryptography is to a certain degree
based on trusting a handful of experts, maybe the world's top 100 
(300? 1000?) in cryptography.

Does this require those people to be trustworthy?

What if a cryptographer is found to intentionally have given a false
expertise in cryptography and security just to do a colleague a favor,
when he erroneously assumed the expertise would be kept secret? Would
such a cryptographer be considered as burned? Wouldn't he give more
false expertises once he's getting paid for or asked by his government?

I'd be interested in your opinions.

regards
Hadmut


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