Obviously the title of this post is provocative, but reading some recent news it is evident that us, IT professionals and IT industry, are not good in managing cryptography. The consequence is that we deploy cryptography in IT products and give a false sense of security to the users. This actually can have worse consequences than if we would not use cryptography at all. I will give just a couple of examples.

This research paper shows how a well-known brand of hard disks has implemented disk encryption in totally faulty ways, to the point that for some disk models hardly any security is provided by the built-in disk encryption functionalities. This is just another of many similar cases, where cryptographic protocols and algorithms are incorrectly implemented so to cancel all or most of the security that they should provide.

Another research paper shows how a well-funded agency or corporation can in practice break the encryption of any data encrypted with the Diffie-Hellmann (DH) key exchange algorithm using keys up to 1024 bits included. Should we be shocked by this news? Not really since already 10 years ago it was known that a key of 1024 bits is too short for DH. Indeed, as per RFC 7525, a 1024 bit DH key offers a security less than a conventional bit security of 80 bits, but again RFC 7525 states that the absolute (legacy) minimum required conventional bit security must be 112 bits, and the current minimum required conventional bit security is 128 bits, that would practically correspond to a 2048 bits DH key. Even if we, IT professionals and IT industry, have known for at least 10 years that 1024 bits DH keys are too short to offer security to the data that they should protect, as of today a too large number of HTTPS websites, VPNs and SSH servers use DH keys of 1024 bits or less (see again the research paper mentioned above).

Unfortunately these are not two isolated examples, recent news are full of similar facts. So I start to wonder if we are good enough to manage cryptography or if we should look into something else to protect IT systems.