Science Quote by Bruce Schneier

Schneier’s line is a carefully aimed counterpunch at the tech industry’s recurring fantasy that security can be willed into existence by novelty, secrecy, or marketing gloss. By invoking “20 years of cryptanalytic review,” he’s not praising RSA’s elegance so much as sanctifying the only process that matters in modern cryptography: sustained, hostile scrutiny by people who want to break your claims. The confidence isn’t in the algorithm as an object; it’s in the social machinery that has tried, loudly and repeatedly, to embarrass it.

The phrase “No one can duplicate” is doing rhetorical work. It’s a warning to startups and vendors selling “new, faster, unbreakable” schemes, but it’s also a jab at procurement cultures that treat crypto like a feature checklist. You can copy code. You can’t quickly manufacture the track record that comes from years of public attack, incremental fixes, and the quiet survival of real-world deployment. Schneier is smuggling in a worldview: security is earned, not asserted.

Context matters, too. RSA became a flagship not just because it was clever, but because it sat at the center of a historic pipeline: academic publication, public standards, commercial adoption, and an ongoing arms race with cryptanalysts. Schneier’s subtext is institutional: trust is a function of time, transparency, and adversaries. If your system hasn’t been a tempting target long enough to attract serious enemies, your “confidence” is just optimism with a press release.