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Reviewing Encryption Code Snippets from Stack Overflow

Scott Contini explains some problems with popular encryption code snippets on Stack Overflow:

I’m not doing this to shame those who have made mistakes: Instead, I want to do my part to help fix the problem. As an AppSec specialist, I get really tired of having the same discussions over and over. I try real hard to make it easy for people to do the right thing: I point them to code that is safe to use, such as Luke Park’s Secure Compatible Encryption Examples. Despite this, there are the occasional teams who just continue to resist, even before the code has made it to production which is the best time to fix it. This makes everybody’s lives more difficult: it wastes my time to have to explain to them why their code is wrong, and it forces the teams to have to do a lot more work later because once the bad cryptography is in production, they need a migration plan to fix it.

Read on for a great explanation of common problems in encryption code.