3 ms·

A natural extension of the industry requirement for crypto implementations to be open-sourced. How can you rely on the security of a system you cannot inspect?

A natural extension of the industry requirement for crypto implementations to be open-sourced. How can you rely on the security of a system you cannot inspect? The trouble is that security through obscurity is the physical standard - you can't keep a lock everyone knows the cut for - so the non-technical approach is sticking with what you know. It's disturbing that a major corporation has the lobbying power to back that kind of unsafe position for its own gain, though.

wongarsu 9y ago
Security through obscurity is a factor in physical security, but locks are really not an example of that. The construction of most locks is well documented, or easy to reverse engineer by buying an identical lock. The thing keeping a lock secure is the key, which is a regular secret just like any crypto key. Nobody would claim ssh does security by obscurity because anyone who knows my key can get into my server.
- ivanbakel 9y ago
  Well, I meant more that, in contrast to an asymmetric keypair, you can't leave a criminal alone with a lock for as long as you please. With enough time to gather information about a specific lock, someone can eventually use it to get a key - no amount of time with your public key will, at present, give you its private counterpart. The lock itself is not inherently secure in a way that having it won't compromise the key, so its security comes somewhat from the obscurity of the internals of each lock. It's not an exact metaphor, I admit, but it's relevant to the fears of OSS - people think leaving all your public information on the table is enough to compromise the system, because in a physical model, it effectively is.
  - wongarsu 9y ago
    There are lock design where short of brute-forcing you can't gain any useful information. But in a way locks are hard to equate to digital concepts because typical locks are laughably insecure and can be bypassed with a $30 Amazon purchase and a few seconds of time on the lock.

wongarsu 9y ago

Security through obscurity is a factor in physical security, but locks are really not an example of that. The construction of most locks is well documented, or easy to reverse engineer by buying an identical lock. The thing keeping a lock secure is the key, which is a regular secret just like any crypto key. Nobody would claim ssh does security by obscurity because anyone who knows my key can get into my server.

ivanbakel 9y ago
Well, I meant more that, in contrast to an asymmetric keypair, you can't leave a criminal alone with a lock for as long as you please. With enough time to gather information about a specific lock, someone can eventually use it to get a key - no amount of time with your public key will, at present, give you its private counterpart. The lock itself is not inherently secure in a way that having it won't compromise the key, so its security comes somewhat from the obscurity of the internals of each lock. It's not an exact metaphor, I admit, but it's relevant to the fears of OSS - people think leaving all your public information on the table is enough to compromise the system, because in a physical model, it effectively is.
- wongarsu 9y ago
  There are lock design where short of brute-forcing you can't gain any useful information. But in a way locks are hard to equate to digital concepts because typical locks are laughably insecure and can be bypassed with a $30 Amazon purchase and a few seconds of time on the lock.