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Distributed Security
A reader writes: ""Where Schneier had sought one overarching technical fix, hard experience had taught him the quest was illusory." A long and detailed article at The Atlantic Online on why Bruce Schneier has come down from his strong cryptography tower to preach the gospel of small scale, ductile security against the popular approach of broad scale, often high tech security that often proves to be very brittle."
Ductility - the ability to fail gracefully - isn't just essential in the area of security, it's true for reliable systems generally. All programmers who've worked on stuff like Combat Systems for ships, aircraft avionics, railway control systems etc should know this, and most do.
There are 2 ways of making things secure - either against outside attack, or internal failure. I call them the Battleship and the Blob. With the Battleship, you load up the Firewall, or put in 2048-bit encryption, or even have an air gap. You basically rely on a layer of "armour plate" that your predicted threat can't penetrate. But this often fails - the threat either goes around the armour, or the incoming shell is bigger than you'd bargained for, and penetrates. Far safer in practice, though not in theory, is the Blob. This has layer after layer of safety features, each of which is easily circumvented in isolation, but every one of which limits the damage. Bugs can exist, attacks get through, but it works anyway. You can shoot the Blob full of holes, but it keeps on oozing along... Terminator 2 not Terminator 1.
What does this mean for programmers? Use strong typing (if your language doesn't support it, fake it with explicit sanity checks, boolean isSane()), always check inputs for sanity, check your outputs are plausible at least, get good peer review on everything, KISS, basically all the techniques professional Software Engineers rather then 31337 haXOrs have been spouting on about for some time. The software equivalent of "Wear belt, braces, keep a piece of string in your pocket, and then make sure your underwear's in good shape."
Zoe Brain - Rocket Scientist
Technological solutions for social problems (like legislative ones) are only as good as their worst failure mode.
I'm tempted to write more in this /. comment but I think that idea is pretty deep. The article (for those who didn't want to read it all, I don't blame you) describes how Schneier came to realize this.
I believe one of our ex-presidents (LBJ perhaps) has a quote where he expresses the same idea about laws.
Unfortunately, the most effective solutions aren't always the ones chosen. Our current government seems to have no concept of the idea that you don't just have to "do something", you have to do the right "something".
Since /. readers are such a cynical and paranoid bunch, we can come up with all sorts of failure modes for today's "security". Imagine the dumb blank look that would appear on Ashcroft's face if you asked him "what if someone gets a copy of the fingerprint used in those biometric systems? will the federal government be paying for finger transplants?". Then after a few seconds the blank look will disappear, and the lies and bullshit would stream out.
Just like the TV talk shows. One intelligent guest will make a simple point ("what if they sharpen the edge of a credit card? isn't that more dangerous than a nail clipper?"), which to me would be an instant show-stopper, forcing me to stop and re-think the whole system, but then the other guests will pile the bullshit so high the point is quickly forgotten.
It makes you wonder if the legislators actually consulted any security experts (that weren't trying to sell something). Probably not.
The article brought up a good point about cryptosystems that depend on keeping the algorithm secret. Once that secret gets out, the security is hopelessly compromised. The Germans learned this the hard way in WWII.
I think this has a nice parallel to the entertainment industry's approach to DRM. The fiasco with DVD encryption is a perfect example. Once the format was broken, the genie was out of the bottle. Making laws to try and stuff the genie back in just will not work.
With the ever increasing number of people who try to break security protocols as a hobby, it seems that relying on secrecy to keep things safe is a recipe for disaster. The internet allows information to be distributed so quickly and widely that no secret will stay secret very long.
If the entertainment/software/etc industries continue to rely on their nonexistant ability to keep secrets, we will either have an overabundance of silly overbroad laws, or else the companies will falter and die. No matter how large and dedcated their tech geeks are, there is no way to match the vast number of hobbyist nerds trying to break stuff for fun.
<clip> "The trick is to remember that technology can't save you," Schneier says. "We know this in our own lives. We realize that there's no magic anti-burglary dust we can sprinkle on our cars to prevent them from being stolen. We know that car alarms don't offer much protection. The Club at best makes burglars steal the car next to you. For real safety we park on nice streets where people notice if somebody smashes the window. Or we park in garages, where somebody watches the car. In both cases people are the essential security element. You always build the system around people."</clip>
In recent years I have noticed an increasing chorus in the media extolling the virtues of Europe, its peacefulness, its openness. I feel a small nagging doubt
One of the key differentiators between the US and the EU is that the US has a far lower population density. And because of the conquest and genocide of the indigeneous population, much of the land in the US was wide open and available for colonisation. As your referenced article points out, this led to the emergence of an "avoidance" strategy for handling social development in the US: just up stakes and move west, young man.
For the most part, Europeans don't have this luxury. The social networks that bind European societies are more complex and tightly knitted than US ones. It's related to how the sociologist Norbert Elias describes social interdependencies and the mannered society. European manners have evolved to handle large groups of sometimes wildly divergent peoples and cultures that must live intermingled with each other.
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