October 31, 2002

While getting involved in

While getting involved in some SSL/TLS programming in recent days, I have been wondering about real versus perceived threats to secure communication. Read any of the articles and books about secure communications, and you hear of many possible threats, some actually quite intricate. These books and articles rarely put threats into perspective. Here are a few examples of threats:

  • short key length of DES makes it "easy" to crack
  • insufficiently random data
  • possibility of finding two strings that hash to the same value
  • a "man in the middle" causes communicating parties to negotiate down to a weaker algorithm

These are all threats, to be sure. But how much of a threat? How do these compare to the threat that a private key is compromised and the CRL is not distributed in time to stop the damage? Or the threat that someone falsely impersonates an organization to the Certification Authority to get a certificate? (like someone impersonated Microsoft not too long ago)

Posted by Doug Sauder at October 31, 2002 12:37 AM