Talk:Kerckhoffs' principle

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A nit, but a philiosophically important one. In his law, K noted something, which happens to be true about crypto use and about what its users should assume about the threat environmetn and how they can / should best respond. It is only because this is true that 'the majority of civilian crypto...'. It is not because of his statement of it. One might equally say the same thing about Shanno's Maxim, and be equally skew to the actual situation.

It is this, among many related points, that I'm struggling with at crypt engineering and crypto system. That's why they've been under construction for so long. ww 16:09, 17 Apr 2004 (UTC)

OK, I've gone with "In accordance with", not "because of". Note that here (and presumably cryptoengineering and cryptosystem), we cannot assert that Kerckhoffs' law is true because of NPOV, even if we think it is. — Matt 16:39, 17 Apr 2004 (UTC)

I've never heard of this principle referred to as a "law", except in Wikipedia (and I just checked three different independently-authored crypto books). I've heard of the circuit-theoretic "Kirchhoff's laws", but I've never heard the term used in cryptology. I think the author of the article was confused, and I think this article should probably be renamed as "Kerckhoff's principle" (or, alternatively, "Kerckhoff's assumption"). -- Wonderstruck 05:26, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

I think you might be right. — Matt Crypto 20:41, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

Ok, I've moved the article to "Kerckhoffs' principle". I chose "principle" over "assumption" to be consistent with the corresponding non-english articles. Wonderstruck 07:28, 12 June 2006 (UTC)