We often say that researchers break poor security systems and that feats of cryptanalysis involve cracking codes. As natural and dramatic as this shorthand may be, it propagates a subtle and insidious fallacy that confuses discovery with causation. Unsound security systems are "broken" from the start, whether we happen to know about it yet or not. But we talk (and write) as if the people who investigate and warn us of flaws are responsible for having put them there in the first place.

Words matter, and I think this sloppy language has had a small, but very real, corrosive effect on progress in the field. It implicitly taints even the most mainstream security research with a vaguely disreputable, suspect tinge. How to best disclose newly found vulnerabilities raises enough difficult questions by itself; let's try to avoid phrasing that inadvertently blames the messenger before we even learn the message.