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A comment on Everything you need to know about cryptography in 1 hour. Parent comment

Re:Everything you need to know about cryptography in 1 hour by tptacek on Friday May 14, 2010 @12:44PM (#1347774)
But, for instance, you recommended CTR-mode AES-256, but didn't discuss:

* How to set the counters so that counter/IV can't collide and destroy your security

* What metadata your messages need to include to make them not replayable

* How to canonicalize your messages so that the process of packing, authenticating, encrypting, decrypting, and unpacking doesn't change the intent of a message.

I think that may be what the grandparent comment is getting at.

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Re:Everything you need to know about cryptography in 1 hour by NateLawson on Friday May 14, 2010 @03:27PM (#1348301)
Excellent points. I would much rather have seen a talk on the hard issues such as these. Choosing an algorithm is simple if you already handle the above issues -- you've already heard a lot about AES by then. On the other hand, choosing AES-CTR as Colin recommends in the talk without handling the above issues is exactly where most developers are today.

Put another way: find me one crypto library or application implementing CTR mode that got all the above issues right but used a poor block cipher (not AES or 3DES).

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