Re: NSA and Netscape Crack

[Christian Wettergren <cwe@Csli.Stanford.EDU>]

| Believe it or not we don't like being trashed for
| being stupid all over the net, print media, and TV.  As far as I know
| the NSA have not given us any advice about how to make our system
| stronger.  I've heard rumors that they were quite upset when they
| learned that SSLs 40-bit RC4 was actually 40-bit secret and 88-bit salt.

It is dangerous that the general reaction is that of
'them being stupid', since that will prevent others
from stepping forward and reveal their own 'holes'.

I decree that 'all holes look stupid once located'.

But 'any non-trivially large program is bound to have
holes' => 'all programmers are stupid' (except me,
because I found the hole?)

Jeff, your and Netscape prompt response to this is
what counts - holes will always be uncovered, it's the
time before they are patched that really matters.

/Christian