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jrmgyesterday at 4:27 PM1 replyview on HN

Don’t like that you’re getting downvoted here! This is a pet peeve of mine. All security is ‘security through obscurity’ when you get right down to it.

Cryptography is just a collection of ‘obscure’ keys (and, arguably, algorithms) that someone nefarious has to guess or work out - or social engineer out of someone - to access data. They’re just really hard to guess or work out.


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eadwuyesterday at 5:20 PM

Pet peeve of mine as well.

To me this is a major problem of everyone saying security through obscurity is bad. But then those same people reinforcing encryption as a gospel of security.

As far as I know, there are no secrets in the world. Encryption is not providing security to anything. It only gives you guarantees wrt to a certain interpretation/perspective.

Modern encryption is underpinned by, no common folk (not no one or even the people who would have the ability to which are probably the ones that should be worried about) should be able to decrypt your contents _within your lifetime_ - which in and of itself is a pragmatic goal, but does not ensure secrets remain secrets.

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