Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Can Bruce Schneier Be Trusted?
An anonymous reader writes "Security guru Bruce Schneier is, among other things, a world renowned cryptography expert, author of several popular books, and a second-order internet meme. He is also an outspoken critic of the NSA, in particular the massive NSA surveillance programs disclosed over the summer by Edward Snowden. Schneier has been involved in reviewing the leaked documents and has put in effort to determine which cryptosystems should still be considered safe. I'm a big fan of Bruce Schneier, but just to play devil's advocate, let's say, hypothetically, that Schneier is actually in cahoots with the NSA. Who better to reinstate public trust in weakened cryptosystems? As an exercise in security that Schneier himself may find interesting, what methods are available for proving (or at least affirming) that we can trust Bruce Schneier?"
Seriously... Especially the Govt. (and clowns - clowns scare me...)
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
and has put in effort to determine which cryptosystems should still be considered safe.
Have someone(s) double check his work.
We should be doing that anyway, even for someone who is 100% trusted.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
If you're talking about absolute trust, i.e. "I trust him" = "I trust him to do anything", you should probably have your head examined.
Phrase your questions better and you will get more useful answers.
Have gnu, will travel.
Problem: Paranoia
Solution: None
Bruce Schnier may be the front-line spokesperson for the security community, but that should be completely separate from his body of work in cryptography. At the bottom line, he's doing mathematics, and mathematical proofs can be reproduced and confirmed -- or debated and disproven -- by anyone else in any country with sufficient background to understand them.
He is not some guru spouting unprovable wisdom from a mountaintop, he is a member of a scientific community, and if he is able to earn and keep the respect of that community, then that's a pretty good indication that he knows what he's talking about.
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
Seriously. The mere act of trusting someone will eventually lead to that person betraying said trust. Trusting someone puts them in a position of power, and power corrupts. You can't trust anyone.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I guess people's paranoia with the NSA revelations have been difficult to swallow. Now everyone is slowly becoming suspicious of everyone else.
Anything is possible I suppose. To me, it was no surprise really. I do have to say that, having worked with individuals in the security community, the primary focus really is the safety of our way of life at the hands of those who would subvert it.
The problem comes when those of less character use the government apparatus for control, political or other purposes. It's the same reason police and military need to be kept separate - one enforces the rule of law, and one protects against enemies. When those lines are blurred, history has demonstrated repeatedly that individual rights suffer. The degree to which this happens is the degree of the moral compass of those at the helm of this extremely powerful surveillance apparatus.
I'm not sure how many true boy scouts are really left running the show up there, but I do know this: the more paranoid we get, the more we lose. All of this need not come to pass in this way. One of the most important things I learned in my time in this world was "trust, but verify" and it rings true today. You can still trust the message that Bruce Schneier has. We have to, for otherwise we will be consumed by our own paranoia. But to verify is probably the most important point. That's where openness and information sharing in the spirit of open source is paramount and what will lead us to the proper conclusion on this matter.
Dude, Bruce Schneider doesn't even trust his own private keys. That should be a lesson to us all.
This question is stupid. It would not matter if he was the most honest, intelligent, and experienced security expert in existence, he would tell you the same thing, do not trust him.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Forget Schneier. The critical question is actually "Can we trust ourselves?" I'd argue not. Many of us post all manner of information about ourselves, our family, friends and work acquaintances on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Four Square and other sites. Our GPS-equipped phones know where we are, where we've been, and can probably predict where we're going and when. Short of unplugging, there's little we can do to assure that we're trustworthy electronic citizens.
If you develop your own crypto system and never share it with adverse parties that really want to show you up publicly - then
A.) Your system isn't secure
B.) You will have a false faith in the security of your system.
If you don't already understand this, that's fine, but it means you shouldn't be giving out advice about crypto systems, as either you haven't actually done any research into the history of crypto OR you want to mislead people.
Thanks for pointing out my Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC) paper!
My page on Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC) has more details, including detailed material so you can duplicate the experiments and re-verify the proofs. Note that you do not have to take my word for it.
You have to trust some things. But you can work to independently verify those things, to determine if they're trustworthy. I don't always agree with Bruce Schneier, but after watching what's he's done for years, I've determined that he's quite trustworthy. This is the same way we decide if we should trust anyone or any thing. In short: "trust, but verify".
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
Blah blah blah, of course I understand cryptosystems. [...] If party C can't figure out how a message was encoded, they can't exploit gaps in that encoding to extract your message.
This statement proves that you do not, in fact, understand cryptosystems.
1. They are playing devil's advocate, not to tear down someone's reputation, but actually to question it in order to put it on a more solid foundation. That is not self defeating, but rather a typical method of proof by dialogue.
2. Your argument seems to be based on deflecting the claims back on the questioner. That doesn't answer the original question about Scheier. Also, your evidence against the writer of the summary is circumstantial.
3. If anyone actually has any evidence against Schneier's trustworthiness, they can present it here. I have seen other Slashdot articles produce just such informed criticism. Therefore this is not a waste of time. The original poster doesn't have to do all the work, you know.
4. One could use similar reasoning to claim that NSA is doing good work.
* Has the NSA visibly harmed America?
* Has the NSA been a vocal critic of America's enemies?
* Has the NSA been on the job for a really long time?
* Do we have any evidence that the NSA is favoring our enemies?
Conclusion: trust the NSA. Isn't that rather shallow reasoning, to put your trust in someone or something merely on the basis of appearances?
Therefore, I would humbly suggest that I could and do logically conclude that YOU are a tool of the NSA, not Schneier, and furthermore, I have more evidence than you do: Your suggestion to consider Schneier as less than reliable based on zero evidence.
Valid point: Me and my question would be another cute way for the NSA to influence society. I can't completely discount the possibility that I'm a sleeper agent, myself.
But just to clarify, I had no intention of discrediting the man, this is strictly a thought experiment, not even conjecture or speculation. I do not mean to suggest that Schneier actually is untrustworthy or working for the NSA. If nothing else, this question has highlighted what may be a flaw in your own security model: you assume that he hasn't "given us bad advice", but you really have no way of knowing that.
This could become a circus. If the NSA can get you to not trust Bruce, Then you couldn't trust any encryption system. If you trust none then you are just where the NSA want's you. Sometime we are going to have to pick someone we trust. Until proven otherwise, I trust Bruce.
Since when is "public safety" the root password to the Constitution?
I picked up your paper on slashdot actually (and probably from one of your posts). But I had never realized that you (as in the author of the paper) was posting on slashdot. That's pretty cool.
What is interesting about diverse double compiling is that it is feasible by a large technically savvy entity (but difficult in practice).
I must say that the trusting trust problem has become huge in the recent years. We pretty much have to rely on somebody for compiling our software and not just compilers. Compiling your own firefox or chromium or vlc is close to being impossible. There are too many dependences or the build chain is too complicated. (A friend of mine run out of disk space compiling chromium...) But assuming that you trust debian (or anyother large entity with technical expertise), you can rely on debian to make sure trusting trust problems do not appear. (And provided writing a C compiler is a standard student project, it should be easy to get multiple compilers to make sure none is backdoored.)