Subject: Re: [Cfrg] draft-irtf-cfrg-dragonfly document status

From: Peter Gutmann <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 9 Oct 2014 02:02:25 +0000

Watson Ladd <[email-masked]> writes:

>I'm questioning the ability of market participants to evaluate cryptography.

Market participants are almost totally unable to evaluate cryptography,
because they're bankers, shopkeepers, hardware engineers, software developers,
and so on, not security geeks.  In my experience of dealing with lots (and
lots and lots) of users of crypto, products are evaluated, in the rare cases
when they've evaluated on something other than "this is what the vendor sold
us", as:

1. The standard says do this (with a side-order of "we've always used double
   rot-13 and if you squint at the standard just right then there's nothing
   there prohibiting this so we'll keep using it", which is why I've been an
   advocate of strong MUST NOTs in standards in the past).

2. We ran a speed test and their AES is 15% faster than your AES, we'll go
   with their TLS/SSH/SMIME/whatever stack.

Occasionally if they're a very large corporate or bank they'll hire in a star
mathematician from somewhere who'll advise them on what crypto to use, which
will invariably be something whose ideal target platform is a slide projector.

So, market participants cannot, and more importantly should not be required to
evaluate crypto.  That's what we're here for.  If we can't do that then we're
not doing our job.

Peter.