On Mar 7, 2015 9:11 PM, "coderman" <coder...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On 3/7/15, Dave Horsfall <d...@horsfall.org> wrote: > > On Sat, 7 Mar 2015, Kevin wrote: > > > >> > No 1 vulnerability of crypto is the user > >> > 2nd passphrases > >> > 3rd overconfidence > >> > 4th trust in the producer > >> > 5th believing backdoors are No. 1 > >> > >> I don't agree that the user should be first on that list unless you are > >> talking about poor implementation. > > > > How would you arrange them, then? I seem to recall that Enigma was broken > > largely due to sloppy user practices e.g. weak message key, re-use of > > keys, repeating same message with a weaker scheme, etc. Used properly, > > Enigma would've been unbreakable at the time. > > > 1. failed software and security engineering. [#'s 1, 2, 4 above all > reduce to this error.]
I strongly agree with this. For example, people are told to use a password managers for each site and most people end up with the same password across hundreds of sites - is that a user failure or one of software? I copy and paste passwords between pgp files and browsers all the time but I don't expect my mom to. > 2. overconfidence [believing backdoors or nation state attacks are > your weakness is overconfidence in the rest of your threat model] Well kinda (not necessarily "overconfidence" but the example). How about this: would the creator of gnupg be getting >$100k per year (I think it's renewed in 5 years - I suspect it will be) without the NSA things? Point being, jumping at shadows can cause productive fear (until you die of a heart attack). > 3. complacency [if everything else is in place, letting habit slide to > convenience, then to compromise, will result in sorrow.] > Orgs with otherwise pretty damn secure software setups do education next to teach their people how not to mess up again (this is generally done after a pentest). However, your average organization isn't going to do this - your average person can't do this. So I wonder whether we really want to change habits or make software that learns to conform to the user while staying secure. > some would say that truly strong, usable crypto systems with integrity > for the common public are impossible. i would retort that just because > we don't know how to build them yet, does not mean they won't exist in > the future. :P > We're starting to build them - take Proton Mail for example. No need to know pgp, generate a key, verify keys (I don't use it so IDK how they handle trust). The keys are local to you. It seems there might be shortcomings with this but I'll give them "pretty good". And this is just one example of how you can take a pretty sophisticated software and make it so that end users can deal with it and aren't likely to leak data and the like. OTOH, systems like Active Directory that are hard to setup, not scalable, allow downgrading of hashes, and have issues like PtH central to the protocol. Again, not something you can blame a user for - just a badly designed system. We can do better - should expect better.
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