[saltcured]

I don't disagree, but I think the folks who know this ought to remember the lay person perspective and try to address it more concretely.

Rather than rejecting the framing because they (we) aren't fluent in your jargon, provide a more constructive hint... E.g. "You may be thinking the symmetric cipher key is simply encrypted with the asymmetric cipher and concatenated to the bulk message. But, to mitigate known cryptographic system risks, modern solutions use specialized key encapsulation or key exchange methods (KEM) which are not directly encrypted messages containing key material."

[some_furry]

> I think the folks who know this ought to remember the lay person perspective

That's fair. I hold Hacker News to a higher bar of technical proficiency than a general audience. My hope with insisting on correct framing is to nudge other experts in adjacent fields to teach your more general audiences how to think about these topics more correctly so it's more approachable to the general public.

[mswphd]

I'm generally sympathetic to your point, it is just difficult for this particular topic. For example, I mentioned how precision in cryptographic language is important, as there was a discussion about combiners for encryption, when really people should use combiners for KEMs, along with hybrid encryption (here, meaning building public-key encryption from a KEM + symmetric key encryption).

The issue is that none of the above is relevant to the article that we are in the comments of. The article is about signatures. Why are we talking about encryption/KEMs in the first place?

One might hope the story for combiners for KEMs (which people may have intuition for due to combiners for encryption, which you could easily show in an undergraduate cryptography course) is broadly similar to the story for combiners for signatures. Unfortunately, that's not true at all. It would be a very reasonable perspective to have that we should use combiners for KEMs but not combiners for signatures. It would be very difficult to communicate this to a layperson without being very precise about the jargon.

This is especially true as this is a topic where a notable cryptographer has spent the last few years libeling several other cryptographers, and spreading a good deal of misinformation to laypeople. He is also extremely litigious, and has either sued or threatened to sue several cryptographers for what I view to be nonsense reasons. For some (at least myself), this makes precise language all the more important in topics he might have his eyes on.

So I both broadly agree with you for most topics, and also this particular topic requires a good deal more precision than most others in cryptography.