That is first of all not true, and second of all not relevant. In both cases the cryptosystem itself had a design flaw. And in both cases the implementations of that cryptosystem, aside from the design flaws, had implementation flaws that made the design a moot point.
I took his point to be the opposite: that the worst that seems to happen with cryptosystems is that implementations are broken.
That bugged me on two levels: first, the idea that there haven't been terrible bugs in e.g. SSL3, and second that an implementation bug means "just upgrade OpenSSL", when it's more like "the discovery of buffer overflows and attendant years of chaos".
