Actually lots of people _are_ using shit crypto. The reason the message keeps being repeated is that it hasn't been effective enough yet. Believe me all of us have enough better things to do with our time to stop saying this if it was all actually fixed.

My previous employer was encrypting customer data (in a project I didn't work on) with RSA. Yes, they were actually using RSA itself to encrypt the user data. If you're thinking "Oh, and that's bad because RSA right?" then "No", that's not actually why - again, I direct you to our main thesis: Stop hand-rolling crypto, this is dangerous and you are going to hurt yourself.

But even if we restrict "people" to just my mother and sister, ordinary users with common hardware and software then that's often still people using shit crypto.

Popular libraries like OpenSSL are full of garbage fire shit crypto. Lots of it is "optional" but did you turn off that option? Does my sister know where the option is? No. Some of it is because people are trying to do very hard things and there's no margin for error, but as this article suggests you can solve that by not doing the very hard things any more. Doing RSA Key Ex with TLS _safely_ is very, very hard. Not doing it at all is easy. So just don't do it.

Cryptography is not like folk dancing or pottery, where it's OK to be fairly bad at it so long as you had a good time.

This is like heart surgery. We don't encourage everybody to "have a go" at heart surgery and hope maybe some of them will do a good job, that would be crazy. People spend years acquiring enough skills to even _find out_ whether they'd actually be any good as a heart surgeon, and some don't make the cut.

What does that look like? Cryptanalysis. Probably starting with a Mathematics degree, but it is possible to get there from another numerate background and a LOT of study.

That's where anybody at all serious - certainly this century and arguably going back to the middle of the twentieth century - starts. They analyse existing crypto systems and they find new problems. They start out a bit shy, hey, did anybody notice that X is actually a member of a Boze-Lechstein inverted group here? Doesn't that mean we could use the Stross-Baxter formula to find X in O(n) time? And after a few successess (and maybe one or two setbacks where they made an embarrassing mistake) they get a reputation so that others in the field show them exciting new things. Hey, you're the guy who first saw Stross-Baxter-Watts, take a look at our SHA-4 contender which relies on a related approach, see any problems?

After you've got a few years in cryptanalysis, maybe, if you feel up to it, you can start to propose new ideas. Your colleagues will respect you enough to take a look, and the first few will definitely get shot down. Ha, you forgot that the Benford-Barnes hypothesis doesn't apply to correlated members, so your new cipher has vast swathes of hard-to-detect weak keys. Not good, better luck next time. But maybe, if you're good, you will eventually make something good enough that people remember it when it doesn't make the cut for a competition. You are now "famous".

Notice how none of this was just some random guy in his bedroom having an idea and inventing a brand new cryptosystem? That's because that doesn't work. It did two centuries ago. If your adversaries are from the late 18th century, you should definitely go try that approach. But the adversaries got a lot better.