How is NSA breaking so much crypto? (2015)
This article cuts to the heart something I&#x27;ve wondered for a long time.<p>The common advice in all the classic texts is that developers should not roll their own crypto because smarter people have thought of more vulnerabilities and addressed them in battle-tested code.<p>But news like this shows that there is an antithesis: the conventional encryption techniques are also potentially widely exploitable by state-level actors. Furthermore if I was someone holding solutions to cherry-picked primes for well-understood algorithms in wide use, I&#x27;d be complaining loudly every time someone wrote a bespoke library too. I&#x27;d be paying to publish books that recommend no one write their own crypto because it&#x27;s just such a darned hard problem, especially with so many high quality alternatives out there tested and ready to go.<p>Granted, one should certainly have a repulsion to to writing custom crypto for all of the many good reasons, but it makes me think it&#x27;s worth putting in more than the minimal effort into it, especially when lives are on the line.