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Inside The Twisted Mind of Bruce Schneier
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Bruce Schneier has an essay on the mind of security professionals like himself, and why it's something that can't easily be taught. Many people simply don't see security threats or the potential ways in which things can be abused because they don't intend to abuse them. But security pros, even those who don't abuse what they find, have a different way of looking at things. They always try to figure out all the angles or how someone could beat the system. In one of his examples, Bruce talks about how, after buying one of Uncle Milton's Ant Farms, he was enamored with the idea that they would mail a tube of live ants to anyone you asked them to. Schneier's article was inspired by a University of Washington course in which the professor is attempting to teach the 'security mindset.' Students taking the course have been encouraged to post security reviews on a class blog."
This article just confirms my belief that a good security professional needs to have destructive mindset. You need to feel the urge to abuse the system as soon as you have seen it. I was not good at it, quit security research to join development!
Okay, I'm not Bruse, but I'll explain. If I open my wireless network, I know it's open. I can secure the computers behind with the knowledge that the wireless system is wide open. This is not really any different then securing the whole internal network against internet based problems. And, on the off chance that he really does have a single AP/router combo with the other computers connected directly to it, then the computers all need to be secured. How does this differ from securing a laptop that you use while traveling, connecting to what ever unsecured wireless signal you can pick up, except that you have to do it to all the devices involved?
So, let's say you keep your wireless system closed. What happens when someone cracks the encryption key and gets access anyways? What happens when an internet bot net gets turned on your router because someone found a vulnerability in it? Lots of people kept secured computers before home routers and NAT became a real necessity. Doing so hasn't really gotten that much tougher. Just more constant.
My real guess, though, is that he keeps the wireless and wired networks separated. Internet->wifi AP ->wired router+NAT+firewall-> computers. Given that he's a pro, the wifi AP and wired router might not even be connected to each other at all.
Anyone can do what Bruce implies only "special security people" can do. It's just that most people don't because there is no incentive to. You might as well announce that your special security mindset has noticed how easy it would be to go into restaurants and put poison in the salt shakers. Hell they are wide open! What were the salt shaker designers thinking of! But of course normal people are just not interested in doing that.
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
You cringe because he keeps saying the same things over and over again.
He keeps saying the same things over and over again because people keep making the same dumb mistakes over and over again.
Tell you what, when you've written a book that gives a tenth of the useful advice, interesting information and insightful analysis of a single issue of CryptoGram, come back and tell us about it. Until then, your words serve only to make you look bad.
My instincts on this are more of "how would a criminal or terrorist" behave in this setting" because I grew up in a law enforcement family (both parents plus extended family). I've made a few "regular people" upset in the past by pointing out the idiocy of their evacuation plans to them in pointed detail. One example comes from high school when the school shootings were just starting to disappear from the news.
Our school gets a bomb threat, and the teachers and administrators are freaked out. They move us all, I kid you not, to the football field where we are fenced in by chain link fence, about 1/3 of which is covered by barbed wire. So I point out to my history teacher, one of the only genuinely intelligent public school teachers I have ever met that we had been corralled into an enclosed area, surrounded by strong sniper nests (there were many points where a shooter with a 30.06 and a few mags could have unloaded with impunity), and that ironically, if there were a bomb, and the person who planted it were clever, they'd have put it under the bleachers where about 200-300 of us were sitting.
He nodded his head in agreement that were this a real thing, we'd probably be fucked because of our administrators' plan, but the one or two regular teachers not far away who overheard acted like I was the real danger for pointing out what should been "the obvious" about this plan. Me? I'd have called in the buses, and shipped everyone off property to be safe right away.
While I agree with many points of the article - specifically that a security professional must have an unusual mindset - I am troubled that the examples leave out the cost-benefit analysis. As an example, the article correctly points out the vulnerability associated with picking up "your car" from a service department. All you need is a last name, no ID. This is an obvious vulnerability. On the other hand, the service department is motivated to make the process as streamlined as possible for its customers. Demanding IDs, etc., will slow down the process. The more cumbersome the process, the more likely customers are to use a competitor. Therefore, they need to trade security with cars to the cost of loosing customers.
I am reminded of the time that I test drove a new car. All the dealership wanted was a photocopy of my driver license, and they let me drive the car off the lot for an extended test drive. Since driver licenses are relatively easy to fake, I wondered how often cars are stolen. I asked, and was told they are stolen on occasion, but insurance covers it. My point, they did the cost-benefit analysis, and decided on an insecure method.
I would say quite the opposite. I think it's well documented that Mr Schneier used to think that cryptography would solve all our security woes, and then he realised this was only a small part of the picture. You may have preferred him when he was all gung-ho on the deeply technical and fascinating aspects of crypto - I love that stuff too - but you are not his audience anymore.
Things that you may think are obvious are just not to most people. He's trying to reach normal people, business leaders, politicians - people who don't get it, or still think security is just boring techy stuff that doesn't work very well. He's trying to show it's also a mindset, a way of seeing the world, that anyone can understand. I think he's doing pretty good, but again, we are not his primary audience.
I take the third view. I believe you need the ability to (forgive the overused phrase) "think different". 100% of what we do every day in life is based on a world of assumptions. To be a good security researcher requires distancing yourself from the assumptions, breaking out of the ruts in the road, and trying different things. The majority of security holes exist because the developers and defenders are making the same assumptions as everyone else. Buffer overflows are the classic example, and we still see them constantly even though they've been recognized for years as a major security risk.
I did in-house beta testing for a time, and used to really piss off the developers because I had a knack for knowing what they weren't planning for. I wasn't so much looking for security holes, but rather ways to crash the app. (which probably many of which were exploitable) A classic I heard was a developer submitting a bug report for "program crashes when it says Press Any Key and you press letter A". The developer called her back to his cubicle, why did you press "A"??? She said her name was Alice, and it said press ANY KEY so she hit "A". "But you're not SUPPOSED to hit "A", you're SUPPOSED to hit the space bar!" At which point the other developer stood up from his cubicle and said "oh? I thought it meant RETURN?" This perfectly illustrates how persistent assumptions are in coding. Not only are they all making assumptions, but they aren't even making the same assumptions.
That's the sort of testing I did. Deleting the last element in a list, Select all in empty lists, saving a form before completing it, entering a 200 character filename for save, taking advantage of assumptions that the user knew what they were doing and would not ask the program to do something that was certain to produce undesirable results.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.