This chapter covers:
- The places where issues arise when cryptography is being used.
- The mantras to follow to bake good cryptography.
- The dangers and responsibilities of being a cryptography practitioner.
In this book, you’ve acquired a sense of the theory, and how it maps to the real world. What’s left is for you to actually apply it. To do this, I would expect you to go through a series of steps similar to these ones:
- You’d find out what are the relevant protocols and/or cryptographic primitives that address your settings or your problem.
- You’d try to find out if you can use already-existing implementations to implement a solution into your application or system.
- Perhaps no good implementation already exists, and you’d be confronted with the inevitability of implementing the protocol yourself, hopefully following a specification.
In this chapter, I talk about what can go wrong in any of these steps, as there are a multitude of challenges that someone who seeks to bridge a gap between theory and practice will meet.