Strength in Complexity?

James A. Donald jamesd at echeque.com
Wed Jul 2 18:45:49 EDT 2008


Peter Gutmann wrote:
> For most crypto protocols, usability is job #8,107,
> right after "did we get the punctuation right in the footnotes for the third
> appendix?".

Usability disasters such as DNSSEC are more common than strictly 
cryptographic disasters such as wifi.  DNSSEC is near impossible to use 
correctly end to end.

Usually a cryptographic system is very difficult to use correctly, or to 
use incorrectly - as for example various VPN products.

Sometimes a cryptographic system is easy to use incorrectly, difficult 
to use correctly, for example https and pretty much everything built on 
top of tls-ssl (old flame, never resolved, as to whether this is an 
inherent design flaw in the very concept of a cryptographic layer and 
any product that uses layering to factorize out the cryptographic code)

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