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Re: [TLS] RC4 Considered Harmful (Was: RC4 deprecation path)

mrex@sap.com (Martin Rex) Thu, 24 April 2014 01:17 UTC

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To: Watson Ladd <watsonbladd@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2014 03:16:54 +0200
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Subject: Re: [TLS] RC4 Considered Harmful (Was: RC4 deprecation path)
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Watson Ladd wrote:
>
> Martin Rex wrote:
>>
>> ECDHE with Curve25519 and single-use(!!) DHE keypairs looks OK, but
>> that might not interoperable with a large fraction of the installed
>> base for another decade.
> 
> There is no known attack against properly implemented Suite B
> protocols known in the open literature. Nor is there likely to be one
> anytime soon: extensive analysis over the past decades has found
> nothing. However, implementation quality can be low.


I'm sorry, but theoretical results mean nothing to me.  For me,
the quality of real-world implementations is what really counts,
and there have been several quite epic failures with (EC)DSA
which are *nowhere* clear from the specification.

One of these severe problems is still present in FIPS 186-4.

(EC)DSA is the cryptoglycerin among cryptographic algorithms,
with casualties all over the place.


-Martin

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