Wireless insecurity at NANOG meetings

Mon Sep 23 07:27:06 UTC 2002

> On Sun, 22 Sep 2002, William Allen Simpson wrote:
> 
> > Sorry, any security requires a *SECRET*.

The only thing security really requires is *trust*.  Secret keys won't do
any good if the platform is compromised.  Elaborate protections are
useless if people who are allowed access are untruthworthy.

No matter what you do it always boils down to trustworthiness of the
physical implementations and people.  Technological tricks simply modify 
the communication space by shifting vulnerable points around.  This is 
often useful, but by no means can eliminate the need for inherently 
trusted devices and people at the end points.

--vadim

PS. As a side note - the "shocking" discovery that ObL's guys didn't
    really use steganography and other modern tricks much and still have
    world-wide network which is very hard to compromise or penetrate 
    (all those montains of cool high-tech gagetry NSA has, notwithstanding)
    is a good illustration: they rely on the "first principle" of building
    trusted systems - i.e. building the network of personal loyalties and 
    face-to-face communications, instead of fooling with techno fixes.

PPS. I'm really really amazed at how people can consider any opaque system
    truthworthy.  Most computer users naively trust their secrets to 
    effectively every one of thousands of Microsoft engineers who can 
    easily plant trapdoors.  The same goes for trusting Intel.  How hard 
    it is for a CPU designer to plant an obscure bug causing switch to a 
    privileged mode?  It is hard _not_ to create trapdoors like that by 
    mistake, even in much simpler designs (check the 30-year old report on
    Multics security).