Hello Nadim, Don't be ashamed. Shit happens. I hope you don't get frustrated by all this. Keep working. It's easy to criticize the work of others, but whats hard is believing in and developing a great project such as cryptocat. This kind of work is really important. Of course, we have to be careful with these things, but... Keep going ;)
gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --search-keys EEE5A447http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?search=0xEEE5A447&op=vindex > From: na...@nadim.cc > Date: Sun, 7 Jul 2013 22:34:24 +0200 > To: liberationtech@lists.stanford.edu > Subject: Re: [liberationtech] DecryptoCat > > > On 2013-07-07, at 2:25 PM, CodesInChaos <codesinch...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > > So introductory-level programming course mistakes are right out. > > > > In my experience it's quite often a really simple mistake that gets you, > > even when you're an experienced programmer. I'm quite afraid of simple > > off-by-one bug, > > places which I didn't fix in copy&paste, basic logic mistakes etc. > > IMO Nadim's main mistake wasn't the actual bug, mistakes like that can > > happen to anybody, > > but it was designing a really weird API that invites mistakes. Nobody sane > > return decimal digits > > from a cryptographic PRNG. > > That's not what the CSPRNG does exactly, but we routed it through an > all-purpose function that wields it to present types of data on demand, be it > random ASCII lowercase, random ASCII uppercase, random digits, random bytes. > And then I messed up and asked it to produce random digits instead of random > bytes and BOOM — security disaster, end of the world etc. > > For the record, I feel deeply ashamed about this blunder. But I can't give up > this project simply because bugs like this are bound to pop up for any > project with this kind of goals and ambition, and our goals are, in my view, > deeply necessary. > > NK > > > > > For example a really basic cryptography mistake is reusing a nonce in > > AES-CTR. Still it happens to people experienced > > in both coding and cryptography. For example Tarsnap had since > > vulnerability for several versions, despite a competent developer. > > http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2011-01-18-tarsnap-critical-security-bug.html > > > > In my own programs I'm really careful about nonces and randomness, but > > still I wouldn't be surprised if a trivial bug slipped through in that area. > > Writing tests which detect such mistakes is really hard. > > -- > > Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by > > emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at > > https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech > > -- > Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by > emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at > https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech
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