Chapter 8
Implementation Issues (I)

Now that we have come this far, we would like to talk a bit about implementation issues. Implementing cryptographic systems is sufficiently different from implementing normal programs to deserve its own treatment.

The big problem is, as always, the weakest-link property (see Section 1.2). It is very easy to screw up the security at the implementation level. In fact, implementation errors such as buffer overflows are one of the biggest security problems in real-world systems. With few exceptions, you don't hear about cryptography systems that are broken in practice. This is not because the cryptography in most systems is any good; we've reviewed enough of them to know this is not the case. It is just easier in most cases to find an implementation-related hole than it is to find a cryptographic vulnerability, and attackers are smart enough not to bother with the cryptography when there is this much easier route.

So far in this book we have...