[daenney]

> Of course; my point is (and I assume that's also the point of other people who assert similar stances on the topic) that the average programmer or software engineer should leave these things to recognized cryptographers.

If "crypto is for cryptographers" is your stance I think you're doing yourself a disservice. Understanding crypto, as in learning the foundations of it, is important for everyone. Having a good grasp of cryptography helps with making decisions in your code base w.r.t to how you use cryptography primitives and tends to help you in identifying places where it's gone wrong.

I agree that it's easy to get these things wrong but I don't think that's a very good reason not to try to write or read up on the subject. And yes, it's possible that what you get taught might have holes too. But it's easier to fix these holes, for example by having discussions around the topic with others and validating what you're being taught, than acquiring the knowledge to begin with.

Now the author in question (lvh) is also known for their contributions to caesium (Clojure implementation of libsodium/NaCl) and Python Cryptographic Authority's cryptography library. They've got some solid chops in the area but make of it what you will.

That said, rolling your own crypto should be left to cryptographers with extensive peer reviewing and so on.

[__jal]

I agree that everyone should learn more about crypto. It helps people understand what is actually going on, and what they can count on and not count on.

Engineers working around crypto that will be responsible for anything important, even doing seemingly simple things like feeding the entry point a password, need to either have their code audited by someone with experience here, or be a person who could audit it. This is because there are so very many ways that seemingly inconsequential things (function timing, hardware behavior in the face of voltage manipulation, nonzero-ed memory in deallocated buffers... and these are the more obvious things) that can lead to a break.

And that's really only a starting point... this stuff is hard. I won't try to write it other than for my own amusement.

[tracker1]

I think it's important to have a decent understanding of types of crypto (including salt/hashing) as well as where to apply what. IMHO it gets harder when it comes down to protocols used for communications, sync/async, etc.

Also, if you're ever interested in something.. find a protocol in a language, and try to refactor it, but first create a bunch of test cases, and make SURE to include unicode characters, etc in any strings you're testing, high byte characters are often missed as a use case, and it gets weird.

Getting multiple systems in multiple languages talking can sometimes be frustrating to say the least.