Daniel J. Bernstein quotes

In general, the Internet was not designed to accommodate deliberate failures to communicate. (Daniel J. Bernstein)

I have discovered that there are two types of command interfaces in the world of computing: good interfaces and user interfaces.

Daniel J. Bernstein

I do engineering, not religion.

Daniel J. Bernstein

I won't be satisfied until I've put the entire security industry out of work.

Daniel J. Bernstein

From a security perspective, if you're connected, you're screwed.

Daniel J. Bernstein

Just because it's automatic doesn't mean it works.

Daniel J. Bernstein

I thank God for not making me a computer scientist.

Daniel J. Bernstein

The most important function of a bibliographic entry is to help the reader obtain a copy of the cited work.

Daniel J. Bernstein

Of course, the test difficulty depends on what you're doing, and on how you're doing it. I'm constantly asking "How much would I have to screw this up to write an incorrect function that passes these simple tests?" Occasionally the answer is "Not much," so I'll throw the code away and start over. It was probably perfect code, but that's not good enough.

Daniel J. Bernstein

The great thing about attackers is that there are so many to choose from!

Daniel J. Bernstein

I often see people saying 'Nobody has produced an invulnerable software system; therefore, nobody will ever produce an invulnerable software system.'"By the same bogus reasoning, nobody will ever reach Mars; nobody will ever find MD5 collisions; nobody will ever cure cancer; nobody will ever prove the Poincare conjecture; nobody will ever clone a human; nobody will ever build a 1GHz CPU; nobody will ever find SHA-1 collisions; nobody will ever break the sound barrier; etc. (Daniel J. Bernstein)

I'm an academic. It's publish or perish.

Daniel J. Bernstein

The average user doesn't give a damn what happens, as long as (1) it works and (2) it's fast.

Daniel J. Bernstein

"So it's tempting to incorporate a smaller resolver library into qmail. [...] I'd no longer be able to blame the BIND authors and vendors for the fact that attackers can easily use DNS to steal mail." [From the file "THOUGHTS" of the qmail distribution].

Daniel J. Bernstein