[Cryptography] GnuTLS -- time to look at the diff.

Philip Shaw wahspilihp at gmail.com
Wed Mar 5 17:01:12 EST 2014


On 6 Mar 2014, at 0:43 , Lodewijk andré de la porte <l at odewijk.nl> wrote:

> What's up with using GOTO in very secure applications? Isn't it wiser to use a functional programming -ish approach? IOW: Isn't this far harder to validate?

I haven’t worked on a cypher suite before, but I have worked on voting software for a preferential system, and that was very goto heavy. This was because a goto-based flow was easier to match to the algorithm defined in legislation - each set of lines in the code were commented with the relevant clause in the legislation. Translating an algorithm into, say, a more functional style increases the risk of a small deviation from the algorithm in an edge case which would be very hard to find by testing because you don’t necessarily know the edge is there. 



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