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The NSA found vulnerabilities, built tools to exploit them, and then allowed those tools to leak. That made us less secure, QED. The argument against that is g
by CWuestefeld 10y ago
The NSA found vulnerabilities, built tools to exploit them, and then allowed those tools to leak. That made us less secure, QED.
The argument against that is going to be "they weren't supposed to leak". But that's dumb. This is the real world, and the best laid plans, etc. We need to build systems robust to what will happen, not just what we want or expect to happen.
- ryao 10y agoThe argument against that is that you are hopelessly insecure if your security strategy is to hope no one develops tools around vulnerabilities in proprietary systems. That is going to happen and they are going to leak whether the NSA does it or not. The best bet is to aim to build systems like seL4 and use properly configured well engineered OSS solutions until solutions like seL4 become available.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tptacek 10y agoThat is an argument whose logical conclusion is that NSA can't do any SIGINT using vulnerabilities: that the "equities process" result should simply be "always disclose". But that's not on the table in any proposal, including the VEP proposal.
- CWuestefeld 10y agoThat is an argument whose logical conclusion is that NSA can't do any SIGINT using vulnerabilities My argument shows that in some specific instances, we are less secure. There's probably still a "net global" argument to be made saying that although there do exist costs, they're outweighed by the overall benefits. The problem with that, in turn, is that we're not allowed to know either of the arguments into the equation. They argue that the costs are zero (which is clearly false), and they won't tell us what the benefits are (other than the unsupported claim that they're immense).