Subject: Re: [Uta] [cryptography] Better Crypto

From: Peter Gutmann <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2014 10:34:35 +0000

Stephen Farrell <[email-masked]> writes:

>Savages is overstated. Even for Peter, for whom savaging is the normal modus-
>operandi:-) (Apologies Peter if you're here, couldn't resist.)

Just subscribed and saw this: I'm not sure what the original reference was to,
but I admit that I do occasionally feel the need to make a small, token
incineration gesture in order to keep cretinism from running rampant over the
Internet... it's a tough job, but someone's got to do it :-).

Providing a somewhat more useful contribution: There's currently a debate on
the TLS list (which I assume everyone on here is probably on anyway) on TLS
usage cases, and why providing them is a waste of time:

  Documenting use cases is an unnecessary distraction from doing actual work.
  You'll note that our charter does not say "enumerate applications that want
  to use TLS".

As someone later pointed out:

  I'm not even going to touch on the embarrassment of having a working group,
  UTA, created to clean up after us.

if UTA is indeed the cleanup crew for TLS then is it worth documenting use
cases and coming up with the requirements derived from each one?

Peter.