ToorCon 9 – Crypto Boot Camp talk
He hammered home one point which I agree with in principal: don’t implement your own crypto. However, from a practical standpoint, that’s misleading. The message should be: don’t implement your own protocols.
What do I mean by that? Suppose I’m designing a new authentication scheme and I naively choose DES as my encryption algorithm. As a result, an attacker could conceivably sniff my traffic and brute-force the key. But suppose further that, in designing my authentication protocol, I forgot to guard against replay attacks (which have nothing to do with my choice of crypto algorithm). Now, instead of brute-forcing the key, the attacker can simply resend the packets to achieve a successful authentication. The latter attack is way easier.


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