[Cryptography] letter versus spirit of the law ... Eventus incertus delendus est

Bill Frantz frantz at pwpconsult.com
Fri Oct 30 03:08:12 EDT 2015


On 10/30/15 at 8:44 PM, pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz (Peter 
Gutmann) wrote:

>So: Deliberately crashing in release code is pretty much always wrong.  OTOH
>continuing anyway, even with slightly incorrect values, is often right, but in
>any case still better than crashing.

This is the opposite of the Erlang approach, where a program 
crashes when it is confused so its recovery code can handle the 
issue. Since Erlang was built for high reliability telephone 
switches, and has been used for them for many years, with the 
right recovery environment, crashing is the right thing to do.

Cheers - Bill

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