[OPINION] Cryptography is too hard to understand, and that's the biggest problem with the field

• TextSecure

  985 24,864 9.9 Java

  A private messenger for Android.

  

You're entirely correct. Part of the problem is the XKCD #927 "15 competing standards" issue. Most of the cryptography standards and common programs sucked for a very long time. Recently a few easy-to-use, hard-to-misuse programs and libraries have popped up, eg libsodium, age, minisign, KeePassXC, Bitwarden, Signal, and maybe Matrix if you stretch "easy-to-use" to the breaking point. But there are still a lot of crappy old standards, old programs, and old articles out there giving bad advice.

• sydent

  710 280 6.5 Python

  Sydent: Reference Matrix Identity Server

  

You're entirely correct. Part of the problem is the XKCD #927 "15 competing standards" issue. Most of the cryptography standards and common programs sucked for a very long time. Recently a few easy-to-use, hard-to-misuse programs and libraries have popped up, eg libsodium, age, minisign, KeePassXC, Bitwarden, Signal, and maybe Matrix if you stretch "easy-to-use" to the breaking point. But there are still a lot of crappy old standards, old programs, and old articles out there giving bad advice.

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• keepassxc

  512 19,071 8.7 C++

  KeePassXC is a cross-platform community-driven port of the Windows application “Keepass Password Safe”.

  

You're entirely correct. Part of the problem is the XKCD #927 "15 competing standards" issue. Most of the cryptography standards and common programs sucked for a very long time. Recently a few easy-to-use, hard-to-misuse programs and libraries have popped up, eg libsodium, age, minisign, KeePassXC, Bitwarden, Signal, and maybe Matrix if you stretch "easy-to-use" to the breaking point. But there are still a lot of crappy old standards, old programs, and old articles out there giving bad advice.

• Bitwarden

  1,055 14,286 9.8 C#

  The core infrastructure backend (API, database, Docker, etc). (by bitwarden)

  

You're entirely correct. Part of the problem is the XKCD #927 "15 competing standards" issue. Most of the cryptography standards and common programs sucked for a very long time. Recently a few easy-to-use, hard-to-misuse programs and libraries have popped up, eg libsodium, age, minisign, KeePassXC, Bitwarden, Signal, and maybe Matrix if you stretch "easy-to-use" to the breaking point. But there are still a lot of crappy old standards, old programs, and old articles out there giving bad advice.

• age

  213 15,264 5.5 Go

  A simple, modern and secure encryption tool (and Go library) with small explicit keys, no config options, and UNIX-style composability.

You're entirely correct. Part of the problem is the XKCD #927 "15 competing standards" issue. Most of the cryptography standards and common programs sucked for a very long time. Recently a few easy-to-use, hard-to-misuse programs and libraries have popped up, eg libsodium, age, minisign, KeePassXC, Bitwarden, Signal, and maybe Matrix if you stretch "easy-to-use" to the breaking point. But there are still a lot of crappy old standards, old programs, and old articles out there giving bad advice.

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

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