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0 pointsbb887y ago0 comments

So, "provably secure" is a catch-22.

If something can be created to be provably secure, then it can be an argument for government legislating a back door.

"You said it's provably secure. Now you can give us provably secure access too without hurting your customer's privacy or security, because they're protected by the 4th amendment."

I don't think this can be solved by technology, I think this comes down to politics of freedom, if you get right down to it. And it looks like you're going to have to have that fight anyway.

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TimTheTinker7y ago· 2 in thread

The goal of probably secure computing would be merely to (hopefully) extend the mathematical certainties of cryptography to computers and software. The politics of cryptography wouldn’t change, they would only be broadened. Intentional back doors would still be possible, and the ramifications of building them would be just as dire.

So the best provable security could do would be to eliminate security holes like buffer overflow/etc. Trust issues (and even side-channel attacks) would still be present as always.

bb88OP7y ago

Then you're probably using the wrong language.

TimTheTinker7y ago

Well I did say "in the theorem-proving sense", meaning that the code undergoes formal verification. There are programming languages for which each function is a theorem that is proved at compile time. That's what I meant.

There are some low-level libraries that have already been partially converted to theorem-proved functions for the sake of security.

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