3 ms·

I'm not sure if you were trying to prove his point, but you did

• woofie11 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure I know what constitutes a proof, and that wasn't it. The core reason this did not constitute a proof is because physical security people misapply lessons from that domain to digital, and software engineers misapply lessons from digital to physical. In the virtual world, I'm open to 7 billion potential attackers. In the physical world, I'm open to a few. That leads to very different security practices. If I leave my front door unlocked for a week, the security risk is minimal where I live. Casual security is good enough. If I leave my computer with even a pretty obscure vulnerability connected to the internet for 5 minutes, odds are pretty good it will be compromised. Clipboards+lanyard+high viz vest is imperfect security (and I chose the example deliberately to illustrate that), but it is good enough security to practically prevent physical compromises in most instances. I won't run a military base that way, or a HIPAA-compliant data system, but it's good enough for 95% of uses, including, for example, a university physics department's research data system. Even a military base doesn't have perfect security; a well-resourced attacker can compromise it. In contrast, in the virtual world, I want cryptographic protocols where I can prove perfect security, at least given a relatively small set of assumptions.