WHY CRYPTOGRAPHY IS HARDER THAN IT LOOKS

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cash, cryptography is an essential part of today’s information systems. … After all, weak cryptography looks the same on the shelf as …

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WHY CRYPTOGRAPHY
IS HARDER THAN IT LOOKS
by Bruce Schneier
From e-mail to cellular communications, from secure Web access to digital
cash, cryptography is an essential part of today’s information systems.
Cryptography helps provide accountability, fairness, accuracy, and confidentiality.
It can prevent fraud in electronic commerce and assure the validity of
financial transactions. It can prove your identity or protect your anonymity. It
can keep vandals from altering your Web page and prevent industrial competitors
from reading your confidential documents. And in the future, as commerce
and communications continue to move to computer networks,
cryptography will become more and more vital.
But the cryptography now on the market doesn’t provide the level of security
it advertises. Most systems are not designed and implemented in concert with
cryptographers, but by engineers who thought of cryptography as just another
component. It’s not. You can’t make systems secure by tacking on cryptography
as an afterthought. You have to know what you are doing every step of
the way, from conception through installation.
Billions of dollars are spent on computer security, and most of it is wasted on
insecure products. After all, weak cryptography looks the same on the shelf as
strong…