Introduction 9
Transparency
Transparency refers to how much of the software is visible. For
most users, this is irrelevant—they just want the software to
work properly, without causing system crashes or scrambling
their recipe collection. You’re probably in this category. In the
security industry, however, transparency is a vital question.
People who are serious about security—serious as in “bil-
lions and billions of dollars and/or many human lives depend
on this information remaining private”—hire security experts
to evaluate their security software and point out problems.
The process of reviewing code and algorithms for problems is
called auditing.
Encryption is an old science, and one of its primordial
rules is that knowing how a good encryption ...