On 17/09/13 23:52 PM, John Kemp wrote:
On Sep 17, 2013, at 2:43 PM, Phillip Hallam-Baker <hal...@gmail.com
I am sure there are other ways to increase the work factor.
I think that "increasing the work factor" would often result in
switching the kind of "work" performed to that which is easier than
breaking secrets directly.
Yes, that's the logical consequence & approach to managing risks.
Mitigate the attack, to push attention to easier and less costly
attacks, and then start working on those.
There is a mindset in cryptography circles that we eliminate entirely
the attacks we can, and ignore the rest. This is unfortunately not how
the real world works. Most of risk management outside cryptography is
about reducing risks not eliminating them, and managing the interplay
between those reduced risks. Most unfortunate, because it leads
cryptographers to strange recommendations.
That may be good. Or it may not.
If other attacks are more costly to defender and easyish for the
attacker, then perhaps it is bad. But it isn't really a common approach
in our security world to leave open the easiest attack, as the best
alternative. Granted, this approach is used elsewhere (in warfare for
example, minefields and wire will be laid to channel the attack).
If we can push an attacker from mass passive surveillance to targetted
direct attacks, that is a huge win. The former scales, the latter does not.
"PRISM-Hardening" seems like a blunt instrument, or at least one which
may only be considered worthwhile in a particular context (technical
protection) and which ignores the wider context (in which such technical
protections alone are insufficient against this particular adversary).
If I understand it correctly, PRISM is or has become the byword for the
NSA's vacuuming of all traffic for mass passive surveillance. In which
case, this is the first attack of all, and the most damaging, because it
is undetectable, connects you to all your contacts, and stores all your
open documents.
From the position of a systems provider, mass surveillance is possibly
the most important attack to mitigate. This is because: we know it is
done to everyone, and therefore it is done to our users, and it informs
every other attack. For all the other targetted and active attacks, we
have far less certainty about the targetting (user) and the
vulnerability (platform, etc). And they are very costly, by several
orders of magnitude more than mass surveillance.
iang
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