Crypto stars sound off on e-voting, DRM

The panel of cryptography experts was also critical of software giant Microsoft, weighing in on a variety of issues, including the Redmond, Washington company's security plans and revelations that its Windows source code was recently leaked onto the Internet. Speaking shortly after Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates addressed the RSA Conference, Adi Shamir of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, another RSA algorithm creator, said that the release of the proprietary source code probably would not pose a security risk to Windows users, but showed that Microsoft wasn't in control of its code.

If the company had fingerprinted its released code, it would have quickly been able to say where the leaked code came from. The fact that the company initially appeared confused about the source of the leak showed that even simple security measures are sometimes ignored by powerful companies, he said. The leak of the source code posed ethical problems for legitimate security researchers, who risk violating the law in analyzing the code - a problem that virus writers and online criminals don't have, Kocher said. Microsoft should officially release the leaked code passages for analysis and enable security researchers to legally examine it, he said.

Kocher was also critical of the security measures Gates outlined in his speech, noting that none of the company's proposed measures involved simplifying Windows, but instead required more additions to the already massive code base. In a statement that elicited loud applause from the audience, Kocher said that Microsoft should look for ways to make Windows less and not more complex. "As a species, we're not smart enough to handle the complexity of this stuff. You have to get the complexity out of there," he said.