> To err is to be human, but to routinely make preventable mistakes because people with my exact skillset haven’t yet delivered easy-to-use, hard-to-misuse tooling in the programming languages actual developers use–meeting them where they are, as it were?
This paragraph shifts the blame around to the implentors of cryptographic libraries.
Some cryptographic assumptions can be enforced by a type system and runtime checks. But we probably still need to have good reading resources to learn about how to properly use common cryptographic algorithms so that developers can recognize when there is something awry with a cryptographic library. And these reading resources need to be well-known in the community to have an impact. Does anyone here know of some good books or good websites that explain the things that developers need to know?
> This paragraph shifts the blame around to the implentors of cryptographic libraries.
I think a subtlety here didn't scan for most HN users: I'm blaming myself when I write that.
Building the tools that solve your exact needs is my hobby horse. Providing developer tools that are easy to use and hard to misuse is a significant time investment of mine. For more on that, read any of my blog posts or GitHub repositories over the years.
It's extremely frustrating to me that, despite all of the effort I've put into this problem (both as my blogging persona and professionally), people still think "I'll try to encrypt secrets using Node's crypto module" in 2025, and end up with less secure implementations.
(If you want to go down this route of inventing it yourself, rather than using an off-the-shelf solution, start with hpke-js and forget RSA exists entirely.)
The way I understand it: You are blaming yourself (and people in a similar position) because you know better and you have the ability to create better libraries.
But as someone who does a lot of software engineering, I also recognise that writing reliable software is time-intensive. And writing library code that doesn't have any cryptographic flaws is probably extra time-intensive, because there is no crypto-aware type checker or linter watching over your shoulder, because afaik these tools don't exist. Good cryptographic software is not written in a day and I know that this is very frustrating. I've got a lot of half-finished side-projects laying around...
But my original sub-point still stands: We need better well-known learning resources on how to use cryptographic algorithms correctly, so that we as developers can recognize misuse of/by libraries. And I'm happy to hear any suggestions for books and websites.
This paragraph shifts the blame around to the implentors of cryptographic libraries.
Some cryptographic assumptions can be enforced by a type system and runtime checks. But we probably still need to have good reading resources to learn about how to properly use common cryptographic algorithms so that developers can recognize when there is something awry with a cryptographic library. And these reading resources need to be well-known in the community to have an impact. Does anyone here know of some good books or good websites that explain the things that developers need to know?