This is the old Schneier textbook defense that anyone can make a cipher they themselves can’t break, therefore don’t try, yet doesn’t hold water here.
Not that it’s not true when applied to a certain group of oil de serpenthe salesmen, or to noobs making toys, but it obfuscates the reality of outsider talent by unhelpfully conflating complete frauds with budding learners with enthusiastic amateurs with experienced amateurs.
And reinforces the notion of a priest class, upon which amateurs, encountering the same, should abandon their labors and despair.
It’s also a surprisingly hostile way to treat interested budding cryptanalysts and cryptographers. It is a kind of hazing designed not to forge bonds but verily to discourage.
As in: We only want insiders creating crypto and there’s a reason for that; and in the main it’s not about protecting against flawed security; in fact, this reason is about protecting our ability to break.
Protecting this crucial vital main and security mission of the high priests at the top of this hierarchy (who, nevertheless veil their faces in the shadows: the mages’ hood) is the reason for the weird, captured nature of this field.
And because this little aphorism comes from The Book of Bruce, none dare question for fear of being tarred a heretic and cast out. Luckily, for me, an outsider has no such fear: being already on the outside. And hence is revealed a weakness of the little system of forced organization.
Aside from that, such discouraging attitudes and aphorisms, obscure the fact that analyzing new primitives is difficult.
And they conceal the truth that, it’s not so much that tech created by amateurs has no merit, it’s that it may. And this maybe, makes the job that much harder for the code breakers; the mages; The “surveillance state” that this posted HN article, under which I am adding this comment, rails against.
The code mages would much rather everyone stick to a predefined set of spells that follow the designated parameters of good sense and civility, which i suspect coincides not a small amount with the technical exploitation window of the secret code breakers. Indeed some are secretly designed to be broken: one way designs, unbreakable, unless you possess the kernel, upon which a more elaborate design was scaffolded for release. The designer-in-secret retains the secret kernel.
It seems I’ve had to be more direct than I’ve initially desired to explain my point.
It’s hard to do cryptanalysis, and the experts who do it have limited resources, so they don’t want to have to deal with a deluge, so they architect an academic culture empowered with these cutsie aphorisms to further those ends, as well as capture, guide, curtail and direct the fields search from the shadows. Coercive funding withholding is but one means. The strongest is a culture and acolytes with a fanatical devotion to the orthodoxy that sustains this control.
I understand the complexity of the balance that needs to be struck, but i think with these deceptively closed and captured fields, we all lose out.
At least nuclear secrets is open about just how closed it is and why: it’s a weapon a small club of states wield, and no one else.
Crypto in reality is the same. It’s a shield wielded by the state, not by the public. The public gets, not security nor privacy, but what the regulator deems them safe to have.
This situation cannot be admitted because it dispels the illusion that the field is open and not captured. And also the illusion of privacy and security not being monopolized by the state.
I’m not sure of the exact best balance, but I don’t think the current system is the best.
Perhaps a better balance is crypto being more like nuclear secrets, where it’s open about how closed it actually is rather than deceptively, in the vein of the snake oil salesman, posturing a security that is not, in fact, delivered.
If not ignored this notion will, unfortunately, provoke, understandably, furious reactions from both those who depend on the belief and the security, as well as those in the captured industry, who would rail against it, but cannot do so, thus turn their frustrated expression towards any who expose their embarrassing constraint.
I have no vested interest either way, except in the good of everybody…and I think it’s high time for this discussion to be advanced in a better direction. Government transparency, and accountability depends on clarity with, and consideration towards, the public who depend on them.
