On 2012-04-09 9:15 AM, Steven Bellovin wrote: > Yes, the algorithms and protocols can be very important, > especially if you have serious enemies. They're also more > fun for many folks (myself included) than the really hard > engineering and development work to make the thing usable. > They're orders of magnitude more fun than the arguments in > standards bodies to agree on what is really necessary as an > option, as opposed to something that most people don't want > but some vendor insists has to be there for 2.71828% of > their customer base.
Seems to me that most crypto failure is usability failure. The only massive protocol and algorithm failure is wifi. Also, anything that comes out of a committee, particularly a large committee containing conflicting agendas, evil people, stupid people, and crazy people, is apt to be a massive usability fail, and the only reason why it is usually not also a massive algorithm and protocol fail is that the stupid, the crazy, and the evil have difficulty following the protocol and algorithm discussion. _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list [email protected] http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
