[Cryptography Team] community-developed KryptOn

[Tony Garnock-Jones]

Chris Muller wrote:
> Is everyone here saying that, despite having been around
> since 1976 (thirty years!), PKC best-practices are
> still so complex, dark and mysterious that we should
> not even attempt it?

Yes, apparently :-)  I find it hard to believe, as well, but the advice
from the experts is that there should be as few implementations of
cryptographic toolkits as possible, to make sure that the few that exist
are of exceptionally high quality.

There's a ton of stuff I personally just don't have the knowledge to
guard against (such as timing attacks etc.) quite aside from the
implementation of the primitives themselves, their properties when they
are combined into higher-level tools, and the discipline required around
such things as zeroing key buffers after use and so on.

>> OpenPGP, http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2440.txt

> With this we would send cleartext outside the image to
> this external, highly-complex, non-OO,
> differently-licensed, implicitly-trusted PGP module? 

No, we would produce a Smalltalk-native implementation of the
well-specified, well-debugged, implementation-neutral data and exchange
format that is OpenPGP. It's a good spec; if you haven't read it, I
recommend it.

(I don't see it as particularly complex, either: it seems to me to be
the simplest-thing-that-could-possibly-work, almost (aside from such
things as the old-fashioned preference for binary metadata).)

> But, some of us just want
> real security, not official certifications.

That's why I recommend OpenPGP - it's a tested-and-true
encrypted-and-authenticated-data format.

> And implementing this complex spec will not eliminate
> the need for extensive critique and testing.

No, but it does eliminate the need for some design and design review,
while also providing a certain amount of interoperability.

Anyway, it was just a thought. :-)

Cheers,
  Tony
-- 
 [][][] Tony Garnock-Jones     | Mob: +44 (0)7905 974 211
   [][] LShift Ltd             | Tel: +44 (0)20 7729 7060
 []  [] http://www.lshift.net/ | Email: tonyg at lshift.net