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by hardwaresofton 3938 days ago
no no no no no no no no please no.

There are well documented reasons to use bcrypt/scrypt/etc over things like MD5/SHA1/SHA2. It's mainly a problem of hashing speed. It is also not impossible to understand how these algorithms work (and understand why they are more safe/take more time). If your password hashes are dumped, it's a question of time before they're decrypted. Depending on the algorithm you use, that time can either be minutes/hours, or it can be days/months/an infeasible amount of time.

You are correct that the implicit chain of trust around why you should use those things should not be free of suspicion, but that is a terrible reason to not use state-of-the-art techniques.

Modern crypto is demonstrably hard to crack because of mathematics. The question of whether it is all broken is there, but it's much harder to break/cheat mathematics than anything else (and again, proofs exist to prove stuff).

DO NOT build your own encryption, or put your own "twist" on any existing well-known methods. What you think is clever might take an attacker 10 minutes to figure out. Take a small pill of humility, you're not as smart or original as you think you are.

There is no "break modern crypto" toolkit. Most toolkits that script kiddies use are around broken APPLICATION of security intense. Assuming RSA/AES are not broken, then only theorized attacks require quantum computers. In 2015, it is highly unlikely that your adversary will have quantum computers, unless they are the NSA, and then your problems are much bigger than that (ex. if you interact with any company in the US, you are hosed). The overwhelming majority of businesses are compromised from things like phishing or running (discoverably) outdated software on their servers (ex. Some super old version of tomcat with known vulnerabilities, that announces itself in the HTTP header).

If you have information crackers want, your little security scheme will get owned. It is better to put your trust in proven/provable mathematics, even if you are not an expert. Arguably, your adversary is the kind of person that ENJOYS solving puzzles. Adding one more puzzle is not going to turn them away, it's going to make it even more fun.

When you have a sufficiently bad injury/infection, you don't go try and work up your own remedy, you go to a doctor. The fact that you didn't go to medical school and may not necessarily trust your doctor doesn't make it a good idea to start making up remedies for issues that have been well-studied by others.