Richard Schroeppel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: (Responding to the chorus of protocol professionals saying "please do not roll your own") > I imagine the Plumbers & Electricians Union must have used similar > arguments to enclose the business to themselves, and keep out unlicensed > newcomers. "No longer acceptable" indeed. Too much competition boys?
TLS, IPSec, JFK, etc. are all intellectual property free. No one gets money if people use them. There is no union here with an incentive to eliminate competition. No one's pay changes if someone uses TLS instead of a roll-your-own-protocol. > Who on this list just wrote a report on the dangers of Monoculture? I did. Dependence on a single system is indeed a problem. However, one must understand the nature of the problem, not diversify blindly. Some companies are said to require that multiple high level executives cannot ride on the same plane flight, for fear of losing too many of them simultaneously. That is a way of avoiding certain kinds of risk. However, I know of no company that suggests that some of those executives fly in rickety planes that have never been safety tested and were built by squirrels using only pine cones. That does not reduce risk. I have to agree with Matt Blaze, Eric Rescorla, and numerous others who have said this before. Cryptographic algorithms and protocols are exceptionally difficult to design properly, and you should not go around designing something on a whim and throwing it into your software, any more than you would invent a new drug one morning and inject it into patients that afternoon. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with people proposing a new protocol or algorithm, publishing it, discussing it, etc. Indeed, TLS, AES and all the rest started as published documents that were then subjected to prolonged attempts to break them. If, after something has been reviewed for some years, it then appears to have unique advantages and no one has succeeded in attacking the protocol, it might even be fit for use in products. This is very very different, however, from subjecting your users to seat-of-the-pants designed protocols and algorithms that have had no review whatsoever. Given that even the professionals generally screw it up the first few times around, it is hardly surprising that the "roll your own" attempts are almost always stunningly bad. This is doubly so given that the protocols and algorithms used in many of these systems don't even have a pretense of superiority over the existing ones. The protocols Peter Gutmann was complaining about in the message that started this thread are, for the most part, childishly bad in spite of the protestations of their creators. Are you arguing that it is in the interest of most people to be using such incompetently designed "security software"? By the way, none of this contradicts what a number of us said in our monoculture paper. Perry --------------------------------------------------------------------- The Cryptography Mailing List Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]