Tom Weinstein wrote:The economic view might be a reasonable view for an end-user to take, but it's not a good one for a protocol designer. The protocol designer doesn't have an economic model for how end-users will end up using the protocol, and it's dangerous to assume one. This is especially true for a protocol like TLS that is intended to be used as a general solution for a wide range of applications.
In threat analysis, you have to base your assessment on capabilities,
not intentions. If an attack is possible, then you must guard against
it. It doesn't matter if you think potential attackers don't intend to
attack you that way, because you really don't know if that's true or not
and they can always change their minds without telling you.
In threat analysis, you base your assessment on economics of what is reasonable to protect. It is perfectly valid to decline to protect against a possible threat, if the cost thereof is too high, as compared against the benefits.
This is the reason that we cannot simply accept "the possible" as a basis for engineering of any form, let alone cryptography. And this is the reason why, if we can't measure it, then we are probably justified in assuming it's not a threat we need to worry about.
In some ways, I think this is something that all standards face. For any particular application, the standard might be less cost effective than a custom solution. But it's much cheaper to design something once that works for everyone off the shelf than it would be to custom design a new one each and every time.
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Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set | Tom Weinstein
him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life. | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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