RE: SOI QUESTIONS: 2.6 Formal proofs of security

[Paul Koning <pkoning@equallogic.com>]

Excerpt of message (sent 21 June 2002) by Andrew Krywaniuk:
> For some flawed security protocols, the problem was that the authors didn't
> have any technically savvy people review them. A security proof might give
> you some confidence in those protocols by virtue of the fact that they had
> to hire/enlist an expert to write the security proof.

That's true for some flawed protocols.  Some were so flawed that it
only took knowledge at the level of Crypto 101 to spot the holes.

But what you say does not apply to all flawed protocols.  There's the
classic example of the initial Needham-Schroeder protocol, yet I don't
think many people would want to describe those two authors as "not
technically savvy".

	    paul