RSA: Time for some cryptographic dogfood
One of the most effective ways to improve your software is to use it early and often. This used to be called eating your own dogfood, which is far more evocative than the alternatives. The key is that you use the software you’re building. If it doesn’t taste good to you, it’s probably not customer-ready. And so this week at RSA, I think more people should be eating the security community’s cryptographic dogfood.
As I evangelize the use of crypto to meet up at RSA, I’ve encountered many problems, such as choice of tool, availability of tool across a set of mobile platforms, cost of entry, etc. Each of these is predictable, but with dogfooding — forcing myself to ask everyone why they want to use an easily wiretapped protocol — the issues stand out, and the companies that will be successful will start thinking about ways to overcome them.
So this week, as you prep for RSA, spend a few minutes to get some encrypted communications tool. The worst that can happen is you’re no more secure than you were before you read this post.