Shaming people for leaving useless non essential feature in their code that results in security breach.
And now the jewel of his crown has been compromised.
The funniest part is now that his jewel has been tarnished, maybe people will understand what he was saying.
And maybe too, people that believed privacy can be achieved on the internet will finally look at the problem of believing the 2 general paradox can be solved without at least 2 different constant link on different plans. And the problem is belief is a poor substitute for thinking - critical thinking.
And maybe people will discover the sad truth of the internet.
Security requires a perfect world, where human beings neither makes mistakes nor are corruptible.
Errare humanum est, perseverare diabolicum
Oh! Some says that is what 2 factor authentication is.
I will answer, my intuition is telling me that 2 factor is good for a fixed amount of time/information and that using it correctly would annoy people to the utmost points.
Then people would say well let's accept that fraud exists. Business first. (costs/benefits)
Then I say giving 3% of all e-commerce to the bad guys is like admitting organized crime have a strong budget for even more crime ... and that we are fucked.
Unless you don't understand that ISIS is basically a startup. A startup that overthrow a state to make even more money and industrialize crime.
What Theo (and other OpenBSD developers) have been saying all these years is that it's impossible to /not/ make mistakes, which is why sane design and exploit mitigations are important.
Mad ? Maybe, I wouldn't know. On the other hand, I bet he's really glad all that effort to have ASLR by default was made, because it makes it more difficult for an attacker to exploit vulnerabilites such as this one.
ASLR makes exploits more difficult as long as you have true randomness. It is just a mitigation ... for another problem.
In this case the elephant in the room is stack injection and dynamic libraries. If processes where confined to a well known address space that was self contained ASLR would be useless.. But dependency management would be hellish.
Back to the case. OpenSSH has been openly criticize by 9plan teams for exactly the same reason openSSL has been criticized by openSSH team : too much complexity (not to say plan9 came to anything usable and were right (2 wrongs do not make a right)).
I do have a feeling as a physicist that the S in CS stands for Shortness of thinking. What is obscure is not profound.
And, at the opposite of engineers I don't believe that security is achievable at all on computers. It is like believing there exists a way to avoid triangulation with one strong radio source.
Computers leak to much information (especially in the physical world), and C is a map that is taken too much for the territory. Every bugs are exploiting a wrong mapping of concepts to implementation.
Modern security is like string theory, admired by everyone because it requires great technical knowledge to master, understood by none because it is way to complex for our "human" brains. We live in an era of belief in solutions.
A bit of critical thinking and of distrusts of experts and stuff that you cannot understand without devoting your life to a subject is at my opinion a must.
I distrust mathematicians for their capacity of dealing with the real world and its uncertainties, and cryptography (as much as functional programming, big data, algorithmic, IA, machine learning) is math driven in a pure Aristotelian world. Where perfection and harmony is the pillar of thinking.
I come from micro-electronics, I only see wires (that are antennas), oscillators, multiplexers, gates and basically a dumb automat I can automatize in respect to time of propagation of signal, and I know that modern computers under the hood are in the physical realm of relativity with approximate answers.
I theorize, build, measure, and retheorize ad nauseum until the product is measured to work the way I expect it to in the domain of validity with a good enough confidence and margins of errors are always on my mind to be controled.
Security requires a zero margin of ambiguity. Physical world is bound to heisenberg equation and coupling. Purity does not exist and this cannot be mitigated. The postulate of cryptography are wrong from the core. Real world always win at the end.
Aristotle way of thinking must die. Math is not science.
The base of science : critical thinking as opposed to expertise and "commonly accepted wisdom".
Trust, but check.
And if cannot check, I cannot trust.
Their map (model) is very nice, very detailed and self consistent. But is is not the territory (implementation) and the more complexity we stack the greater we prove the map diverge from the territory. And also the less it can be audited.
Don't expect normal people to trust what they cannot check. It is faith security experts are expecting from users, not trust.
I do my part of the contract as stated by common accepted risk management "best practice" regarding computer security.
Shaming people for leaving useless non essential feature in their code that results in security breach.
And now the jewel of his crown has been compromised.
The funniest part is now that his jewel has been tarnished, maybe people will understand what he was saying.
And maybe too, people that believed privacy can be achieved on the internet will finally look at the problem of believing the 2 general paradox can be solved without at least 2 different constant link on different plans. And the problem is belief is a poor substitute for thinking - critical thinking.
And maybe people will discover the sad truth of the internet.
Security requires a perfect world, where human beings neither makes mistakes nor are corruptible.
Errare humanum est, perseverare diabolicum
Oh! Some says that is what 2 factor authentication is.
I will answer, my intuition is telling me that 2 factor is good for a fixed amount of time/information and that using it correctly would annoy people to the utmost points.
Then people would say well let's accept that fraud exists. Business first. (costs/benefits)
Then I say giving 3% of all e-commerce to the bad guys is like admitting organized crime have a strong budget for even more crime ... and that we are fucked.
Unless you don't understand that ISIS is basically a startup. A startup that overthrow a state to make even more money and industrialize crime.