This, somehow, triggered my mind to recall LifeLock's CEO Todd Davis’s public marketing campaign where he displayed his Social Security number on the company website and advertisements to demonstrate the security of his platform, however, the challenge backfired dramatically and he becomes a victim of identity theft on at least 13 separate occasions.
Protocol design choices that allow unauthenticated memory writes after initial authentication Lack of atomicity when writing cryptographic keys across multiple memory pages Widespread misconfiguration in real-world deployments (unlocked memory, static keys) Non-NXP compatible chips with severely flawed random number generators
> Converse curiously; don't cross-examine.
You could have just corrected them and not goaded them into further revealing their ignorance. Yes, they underestimated how difficult it is to crack 3DES. You could have simply told them that.
The thread that ensued, a discussion of what it means for a cipher to be obsoleted or unsafe versus "broken", is an actually-interesting question.
I feel pretty OK about how this went.
There's a reason POCs matter right? Why you feel comfortable (even though I don't agree) saying multi-threaded Go doesn't have a memory safety problem and yet you wouldn't feel comfortable making the same claim for C++.
Granted, a 2^32 block limit is pretty severe by modern standards.
The 64 bit block size in 3DES (and Blowfish and IDEA) limits how much data you can encrypt under a single key. I think the real "tell" that this isn't hair-splitting is that people don't ever generally talk about Blowfish being "broken", just obsoleted.
that sounds "broken" to me, but i'm not a cryptographer. so, i'll defer to you when you say it's not broken. (i dont know what the cryptographer-specific definition of broken is -- it'd be great if you would shed some light on that)