Re:Important Kickstarter Security Notice
by hga on Saturday February 15, 2014 @08:39PM
(#7246282)
"Adding "security through obscurity" is only a net win over "published security scheme" if your engineers are substantially better than any engineers who might comment on your published scheme."
I think that overstates the case. Your engineers don't have to be better, just good enough know what's correct and safe, or do research until they know.
My approach is to just add things that are clearly correct to published and studied systems that are thought to be correct. In this case, we're talking about applying multiple or multiple runs of one way hashing functions; I'd actually do some research before trying the latter, but it strikes me as safe, and the former is by definition safe, right? Whereas it would never even occur to me to combine PRNGs ... or not use a hardware source of entropy to begin with in the first place (they aren't that expensive in the scheme of things).
I think that overstates the case. Your engineers don't have to be better, just good enough know what's correct and safe, or do research until they know.
My approach is to just add things that are clearly correct to published and studied systems that are thought to be correct. In this case, we're talking about applying multiple or multiple runs of one way hashing functions; I'd actually do some research before trying the latter, but it strikes me as safe, and the former is by definition safe, right? Whereas it would never even occur to me to combine PRNGs ... or not use a hardware source of entropy to begin with in the first place (they aren't that expensive in the scheme of things).