Re:Why I find IOTA alarming
by cesarb on Monday January 29, 2018 @10:10AM
(#16257877)
> I think I get that it's hard, but people make it sound like it's the hardest thing ever. Where does this extreme complexity stem from?
I believe that it stems from the fact that it's easy to get wrong, and hard to know you got it wrong. Furthermore, other than a few special cases like one-time pads, there's no known way to prove that a cipher is secure, only that it's insecure. A cipher designer, therefore, must by necessity be an expert on all the known ways to break a cipher, so as to avoid all the known traps, and defend against the yet-to-be-discovered ones.
I believe that it stems from the fact that it's easy to get wrong, and hard to know you got it wrong. Furthermore, other than a few special cases like one-time pads, there's no known way to prove that a cipher is secure, only that it's insecure. A cipher designer, therefore, must by necessity be an expert on all the known ways to break a cipher, so as to avoid all the known traps, and defend against the yet-to-be-discovered ones.