Strength in Complexity?

[Peter Gutmann]

Pat Farrell <pfarrell at pfarrell.com> writes:

>At CyberCash, where we had real RSA/DES in the system, we found that "users
>want convenience, not security"

I think that's phrasing it a bit badly, it'd be better put as "without
usability, you won't have users" (see the Tor paper "Challenges in deploying
low-latency anonymity" for more thoughts on this).  This is why Skype is the
dominant internet phone protocol and every attempt at building encrypted VoIP
phones in the past ten years or so (anyone else here remember brew-a-stu?) has
languished among a small set of crypto geeks.  As Ian Grigg put it on his blog
a few years ago, "It took longer to do the setting up of some security options
[in other software] than it takes to download, install, and initiate an
encrypted VoIP call over Skype with someone who has never used Skype before".

Peter.

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