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by red_admiral 2177 days ago
As someone who's worked in the sector (the crypto sector, not the crime one):

"Families of Mathematics" is a marketing statement, or "hot air" as I prefer to call it. The information content of that statement is zero, what it's doing is trying to project warm "you can trust us" feelings.

A statement aimed at technical people would read more like "we use AES-256-OFB with Axolotl on Curve25519 and scrypt(2^14, 8, 1)" or something like that.

To a crypto professional, I'd say any "trust us" statement that's not backed up by technical information actually lowers their trust in the system - it makes you wonder why they're not making their algorithm choice public.

4 comments

The US created a fake bank to catch drug runners and cartel bosses. What's to say this isn't an state intelligence backed company created not to sell a product but to be sold to criminals then listened to until warrants were signed?

I haven't looked into the service at all so could be totally off.

Wow. Do you happen to have more details about that fake bank honeypot?
There's an excellent episode of the npr podcast Planet Money that covers this story: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/694548245
That's where I heard it, yeah.
> To a crypto professional, I'd say any "trust us" statement that's not backed up by technical information actually lowers their trust in the system - it makes you wonder why they're not making their algorithm choice public.

IMHO if your solution isn't open source, or least completely documented so it can be verified, then the whole point is moot anyway.

Thanks for clarifying. You convinced me.
I just interpreted that as "we use RSA and ECC".