How is NSA breaking so much crypto? (2015)
This article cuts to the heart something I've wondered for a long time.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.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'd be complaining loudly every time someone wrote a bespoke library too. I'd be paying to publish books that recommend no one write their own crypto because it's just such a darned hard problem, especially with so many high quality alternatives out there tested and ready to go.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's worth putting in more than the minimal effort into it, especially when lives are on the line.