Cracking the cryptography conundrum
It's broadly accepted that the hardest problem in security in general, and cryptography in particular, is designing products that are sufficiently easy to use that they gain wide public acceptance.
Paul Kocher, president and chief scientist at Cryptography Research, wrote one of the exceptions: Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) version 3, the software best known for securing browser connections. "SSL is a tremendously successful protocol but an absolute failure, the argument being that it gives the perception of security on devices that really aren't secure in many cases," he said.
Cryptography Research also built the BD+ content protection software embedded in Blu-ray, which was sold on about three years ago. More recently, Kocher has been involved in building an attack-proof multimedia system-on-a-chip to implement content protection. The chip is being licensed by Broadcom for TV set-top boxes. "My career trajectory began with algorithms. Then I realised they were solved. Then protocols like SSL and then I realised that I wasn't really solving the problem at a grand scale because the software was full of bugs," Kocher explained.
