[Cryptography] Microsoft's new, free, crypto library dubbed FourQ

[Phillip Hallam-Baker]

On Sun, Sep 20, 2015 at 9:25 AM, Salz, Rich <rsalz at akamai.com> wrote:

> > The GNU license is largely a reaction to the proprietary culture [Gates]
> fostered
> > and the relative impossibility of realizing a profit from anything if
> you weren't
> > part of the Microsoft hegemony.
>
> No.  Microsoft  had nothing to do with it.  It was about commercial
> companies making LispMachines, based on work pioneered by the lab where he
> worked, MIT-AI.  For a long time he would periodically climb the microwave
> tower and disconnect one vendor's link, or take it on himself to completely
> re-implement whatever features were in their latest release, and so on.


Yes, that and being unable to modify a printer because the code was closed
source.

At the time there was something of a racket in which people would take
millions of dollars in US govt. grants to build software systems that would
then be claimed as proprietary property. That was one of the issues that
Gates agreed was problematic.


Getting back to security, one of the majort changes with managed code is
that unless deliberate steps are taken to obfusticate, decompilation is
fairly straghtforward.

Having source code seems to me to be a 1990s level concern. Having source
is good but not enough. The biggest problem I have is knowing provenance,
is the code I am going to run the code I intend to run. Does the compiled
match the source.

Using the CLR approach provides the opportunity to optimize to the specific
platform with only one executable to sign.
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