[Cryptography] Complexity vs. security

[Stephan Neuhaus]

On 7/20/26 3:44 PM, Peter Gutmann via cryptography wrote:
> This recently came up on a (public) mailing list but I thought it's relevant
> here too.  Quoted from djb:
> 
>> https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.04940 studied hundreds of CVEs in crypto
>> libraries. There was roughly 1 new CVE per 1000 lines of new code. About 1
>> out of 8 "cryptographic" CVEs was severe.
> 
> An interesting quote from that study:
> 
>    we find evidence of a strong correlation between the complexity of these
>    libraries and their (in)security, empirically demonstrating the potential
>    risks of bloated cryptographic codebases

I once looked at a similar problem, namely CVE fix rates over time for 
some open source projects (paper: 
http://weis2012.econinfosec.org/papers/Neuhaus_WEIS2012.pdf) and did not 
find any trend. But that is not the same problem. Also, maybe that was 
because I was looking not a crypto libraries, but at things like Apache 
web server, Tomcat and so on.

Without having read the paper, and therefore without applying any kind 
of criticism in advance, the problem of measuring vulnerabilities is 
hard. The canonical article I would advise anyone to read before they go 
count CVEs is Christey and Martin's "Buying into the Bias: Why 
Vulnerability Statistics Suck" 
https://media.blackhat.com/us-13/US-13-Martin-Buying-Into-The-Bias-Why-Vulnerability-Statistics-Suck-WP.pdf 
from Blackhat 2013. The two authors are not exactly idiots: Christey ran 
(runs?) the NVD and Martin ran the OSVDB. They know what they're talking 
about.

> If working groups like TLS and LAMPS adopted the rule "every time you add
> something you need to take something else out"
Oh THAT would be a splendid idea.

Cheers

Stephan