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Ask Slashdot: Can Bruce Schneier Be Trusted?
An anonymous reader writes "Security guru Bruce Schneier is, among other things, a world renowned cryptography expert, author of several popular books, and a second-order internet meme. He is also an outspoken critic of the NSA, in particular the massive NSA surveillance programs disclosed over the summer by Edward Snowden. Schneier has been involved in reviewing the leaked documents and has put in effort to determine which cryptosystems should still be considered safe. I'm a big fan of Bruce Schneier, but just to play devil's advocate, let's say, hypothetically, that Schneier is actually in cahoots with the NSA. Who better to reinstate public trust in weakened cryptosystems? As an exercise in security that Schneier himself may find interesting, what methods are available for proving (or at least affirming) that we can trust Bruce Schneier?"
"Even the compiler can be compromised. Ken Thompson showed that."
Well, double compiling techniques can be used to certify a compiler. (Though it actually assume that you have access to an other safe compiler, which is a little bit complicated, but doable)
http://arxiv.org/abs/1004.5534
You know he's designed several ciphers, right? Blowfish, Twofish, perhaps you've heard of them? Twofish was an AES finalist. If that doesn't give him credentials, what does?
I've gotten a lot of hits, and that's a good thing. As I noted in another post, I got hit by reddit earlier this year. In general people are becoming more interested in protecting and verifying build environments, as this post about Tor demonstrates.
So please take a look at my Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC) page!
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
That's a huge jump, and a red flag for a shitty argument. As you wrote it, yes it is misguided. You don't have to make a significant contribution, just understand what's already out there. And it's way more than "a little math".
Yes. That was simple, wasn't it?
Actually, no. Simply understanding the mathematics will not make it clear. Understanding the math, then having it pointed out, or reading Bleichenbacher's paper, will make it clear. But merely learning the math will not... else it wouldn't have taken decades for someone to discover that problem.
The MD5 collision was an algorithm based on math.
No, it wasn't/isn't. MD5, like all modern hash functions, are based on repeated mixing. It can be modeled mathematically, but it's not "based" on math in any meaningful sense.
But the basic statistical analyses which show whether something may be vulnerable, is all math.
Yes, statistics is math. Do the stats for me and tell me if SHA-256 is vulnerable, would you?
The math for AES can be found on the wikipedia.
The algorithm can. Block ciphers aren't really based in any meaningful sense on mathematics either. Mathematical tools are used to model them and look for weaknesses... but there's also a healthy dose of good "intuition" that goes into cipher design.
The current choices for Dual ECC were proven suspect by math.
Partly. The concern derives as much from observation of process as from the math.
The advice is not laughable in context- trust no one. And, it's not impossible to learn this stuff, you can either choose to or choose not to.
I've spent a big part of the last 20+ years learning it (among other things; I'm not a researcher and crypto is only part of my job), and I work with a bunch of other people who've devoted their whole lives to it. And you know what? If you ask them if anything is good, they'll immediately start looking for research papers to find out... because there is no realistic option but to trust the work that others have done, and which has been peer reviewed and vetted.
Don't trust the researchers - verify it yourself. That's not original research, it's just common sense (for the paranoid).
That's not what the researchers do. But you're smarter and more paranoid than they are. Gotcha.
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