6 ms·

The author doesn’t really try to identify from the regulator’s perspective, and it weakens their argument. To the state, one of the most important goals is leg

The author doesn’t really try to identify from the regulator’s perspective, and it weakens their argument. To the state, one of the most important goals is legibility. The state has an enormous burden of regulation in its various enterprises, and the less variance the easier the job. This certainly isn’t ideal in many, many cases, but in this case a person who likely didn’t make the standards quite rationally trusts a vetted standard over one small trivial test given to them by a company they’re evaluating. FIPs standards are probably much more exhaustive than just a hashing performance test on one piece of hardware.

paultopia 6y ago
^^^^^^. This x1000. Yes, it's bad when bureaucracy means that individual bad decisions are made. But casually saying "oh, well, this is idiocy, the government doesn't care about security" ignores the fact that organizing the regulation of human behavior is immensely costly, and the government needs to optimize on those costs. A good dev analogy is using a library function vs rolling your own. The government's library is the list of things that its own engineers approved. The equivalent of rolling their own is for some individual auditor to make an independent decision to deviate from the list. Now, it might be that you can squeeze out an extra tiny bit of performance[/the government can squeeze out some extra security] by rolling your own sort function or whatever, but most wise devs will balance that off against the risk of introducing extra bugs, the extra writing and maintenance time involved, etc. Reality is that this sucks. It would be amazing if it wasn't actually super-super costly to organize human beings to all point in the same direction and make sure that people don't cheat. Government would be a lot cheaper and more efficient. But, alas, reality does suck.
- richardwhiuk 6y ago
  Yeah - utterly agree. The point raised in the article is valid - but the correct thing to do isn't to persuade the auditor they are wrong, it's to push FIPS to include bcrypt instead of SHA2 (although as below, this isn't the right answer either - it should use PBKDF2 or similar).
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    No, the right answer is to push no one on anything, comply with the FIPS standard and suck up the marginally increased probability of a breach. They made the right decision throughout.
  - Nullabillity 6y ago
    You could also consider it a M&M test for both FIPS and the auditor. If they get something this simple wrong, what other issues lay hidden?
  - tptacek 6y ago
    FIPS is never going to include bcrypt. Not including things like bcrypt is literally part of the point of FIPS.
    - wool_gather 6y ago
      Which aspects of bcrypt are you referring to by "things like bcrypt"?
      - tptacek 6y ago
        Modern, superior alternatives to standard algorithms and constructions. Canonical example: Curve25519. WireGuard, for instance, will never be FIPS compatible.
        loup-vaillant 6y ago
        How then, can refusing superior alternative be anyone's point? Are you merely calling them overly conservative to the point of incompetence (I'd be tempted to), or is there another aspect to it?
        yencabulator 6y ago
        One angle to consider here is that FIPS is informed by whatever NSA knows about cryptography, so not all the evaluation criteria is public. You and I may think djb's inventions are superior, but for example NSA might have an active research project into elliptic curves, and refused to endorse Curve25519 until those results came in.
- darkerside 6y ago
  Great analogy. It is a frustrating end result in this case. I wonder if there's any possibility for escalating this to a regulator's technical resources? I wonder if this kind of thing is typically left to the auditor discretion.
- jl6 6y ago
  Yep. That which is globally optimal may be locally suboptimal.
- bjeds 6y ago
  I feel bad for the author for publishing this article. If your (the author) mindset is that "everyone else is an idiot", be it management, or regulators, auditors or some other group that is not your group (engineer?), then unfortunately you have an attitude problem. If furthermore you maliciously misinterpret the other group, saying "they want us to be compliant, not secure", based on misunderstanding the domain expertise _of your own group_ (!), then you are a liability to your business and should be kept at arms length from external auditors. Because the author clearly has no clue what he is doing, and based on his technical shortcomings he is speaking down on others who are _actually_ doing their job correctly: the auditors. Why is the author comparing bcrypt using 32 iterations with sha512crypt with 5000 iterations? Why not increase the sha512crypt iteration count by orders of magnitude if he want the hashcat test to fair equal or better under the testing methodology in use? Why is he using hashcat and basing decisions solely on that tool? Why is he using shacrypt at all and not a a proper KDF, such as PDKDF2, plugging in SHA2?
  - feoren 6y ago
    You're criticizing the author for not adequately understanding the regulatory concerns but letting the regulators off the hook for not adequately understanding the engineering concerns. Frankly the latter feels more important and more beneficial (to everyone) to improve upon.
    - CaptArmchair 6y ago
      The author didn't relate how the exact conversation went down. The closest we get is this: > But the auditors were adamant. They did not care that the approved algorithms were weaker. Nothing would change their decision. That's the 100% the author's perspective. It's quite possible those auditors were aware of the existence of bcrypt and what it does. Even so, their personal opinions simply didn't matter. And they, quite likely, tried to point this out to the author. Yes, a stronger algorithm - bcrypt - existed, but as long as it wasn't a formally vetted FIPS approved algorithm, it simply wasn't an option for operational use. Compliance isn't bad in itself. It's a tool. Compliance is implemented to ensure that large and complex organizations can continue to function as a structured system. It helps ensure accountability, audit-ability, integrity, reliability, sustainability and other "abilities". There is a trade-off, though, when it comes to day-to-day operations. You simply can't improvise. In a large organisations, that's a good thing, which the author clearly hasn't understood. While the direct result is that their systems security is now weaker, that same compliance also shields them from any legal repercussions. If those systems get compromised, they can always point to the list of sanctioned algorithms and the oversight. That's how accountability works. You'll find the freedom and the flexibility to implement your own solutions in smaller organizations. However, that comes at a price: The buck stops at your desk. When something breaks, all eyes will turn to you in order to fix it. And there will be little to hide from. Of course, I'm well aware that there's more nuance to it. There are plenty of stories on both sides of the aisle were the lack of or very existence of formalisms either saved the day or directly lead to catastrophe. That doesn't imply that one is always better then the other.
- throwaway316943 6y ago
  You make government cheaper and more efficient the same way you do with code, by removing as much as possible.
  - eximius 6y ago
    Cheaper is not always better.
    - sli 6y ago
      Likewise, neither is smaller. Code golf is just for fun.
- tw25543818 6y ago
  I think your analogy misses the most important benefit: you must use the government's library. If people were allowed to choose other libraries, then they might choose wrong. And since the government protects companies from the consequences of making bad choices, the government can't let them make those choices. The great failing of so many here is that they don't recognize that uniformity and centralization are more important than innovation. If those innovations really are better, then you can vote to elect representatives to nominate regulators to eventually change the requirements. This is how things work in a civilized society.
musingsole 6y ago
The regulator believing "this system isn't legible to us and so adds burden to our work" is roughly equivalent to the author's conclusion: "They want us to be compliant, not secure". The correct response to all of this would have been an accepted means for individual departments to submit requests for updates/changes to the standard to be voted on before they are forced to comply. The issue at hand is no mechanism for feedback. You can only comply or leave. This is the consistent failure of top-down governance.
- CaptArmchair 6y ago
  > The correct response to all of this would have been an accepted means for individual departments to submit requests for updates/changes to the standard to be voted on before they are forced to comply This would result in, what's pejoratively called, "design by committee" which inevitably comes with bike-shedding, tit-for-tat politics and so on. The NIST is an public institution with a long history which traces back to the origins of the United States. It's a formal part of the state. And it's raison d'être is to ensure that decision making around standardization actually happens. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institute_of_Standards_and_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institute_of_Standard... The point of all of this harkens back to fundamental principle: If you want to travel fast, go alone. If you want to travel far, go with many. The organization of a state catering to many millions follows the latter part of that principle, for better or worst. Standardization doesn't guarantee the optimal solution to a problem, it guarantees a workable solution for the majority of a given problem space. And that's exactly what public governance is about. Ensuring the continued existence of the state as a legitimate, legal entity that governs and serves public interests at large. > The issue at hand is no mechanism for feedback. Well, it's perfectly feasible to... just e-mail them or give them a call. The NIST ITL CSRC lab can easily be reached via their website. [2] If you want to know the decision making process that went into a standard, you can submit a FOIA request. [3] [2] https://csrc.nist.gov/about/contact-us https://csrc.nist.gov/about/contact-us [3] https://www.nist.gov/foia https://www.nist.gov/foia
  - musingsole 6y ago
    That's cool and all, but this mentality creates animosity in the system's participants where it's unnecessary. You're focused on just the system's outcome and find NIST to be instrumental in delivering those outcomes. I agree. But that fails to address the unneeded stress on the system by antagonizing these isolated groups that have made decisions for reasons and have their own history. Appealing to this top-down system ignores how participating is dehumanizing even as its purpose is to serve the people. I'm arguing you can have your cake and eat it too, we're just choosing not to because decision making carries risks. We want to limit decisions to specific people out of fear of that risk, not out of respect for a system that has proven it's correct.
yodelshady 6y ago
Also, the core technical argument - that hashcat proves crypt is better than SHA2 - is weak. I could write a hashing function that looks good if you throw hashcat at it, but I wouldn't recommend you use it. I believe bcrypt is a better choice, but if I didn't I wouldn't have been persuaded.
whydoyoucare 6y ago
Very well said, and agreed 100%. It is crucial that this understanding be built to make the lives of both engineers and auditors simpler!
blargmaster42_8 6y ago
Lol... The state does not care about you! It's goal is power and nothing else.
saul_goodman 6y ago
I get it, the gov has a hard problem to solve. It's a case of both of them being right - the gov needs a common level of gradable security applied, and these folks are in an uncommon position of being able to test and prove that their choice is more secure despite not being a graded choice that can be approved. The auditors are not subject matter experts, they work for bottom dollar to ensure fiscal efficiency and only check boxes. The best choice is shouted down in the name of efficiency. This is also how smart folks will nearly always be chased out of government work. It's always safer and less work to make the dumb safe choice rather than the smarter choice that costs less or works better. This explains most of the big problems we have in government. We're not allowed to make smart choices ever, only mediocre choices at best, worst choices most of the time. How long can we sustain this line of behavior though? We can do it for quite a while yet, but eventually the overhead will kill the state in multiple ways. Of always making mediocre decisions in order to guarantee mediocre results.
Nullabillity 6y ago
Sure, it wasn't a particularly convincing test. But for this kind of standard to work, it has to be kept relatively up to date. It's not like bcrypt is a new one-off algorithm that they invented for this project.
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> To the state, one of the most important goals is legibility. You're making the argument from the book Seeing Like a State. But the thrust of that book is that those practices lead to bureaucratic catastrophes like so-called "scientific forestry" -- which is exactly the author's point here in the context of security.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> The author doesn’t really try to identify from the regulator’s perspective The regulator qua regulator is remote from the narrative, which deals only with the auditors. Who don't even work for the same agency. The agency issuing the rules is concerned with compliance in a way in which actual security is not a factor which mitigates or alters, which is the conclusion made, and is entirely factually correct. The whole story is that important decisions are made extremely remotely (in all of time, organizational structure, domain, and concern) from the project. Now if this was an argument for a specific alternative, or even just generally against the practice without an alternative replacement, it would need to go farther and address whether the approach deals with different, potentially even more serious problems (corruption and/or ineptitude in over-empowered public agency managers, for instance) whether it was a net positive of negative in that context and whether, if it was a net positive, either the specific alternative proposed (if any) or any conceivable alternative would likely be a greater net positive. But that's not what this piece seems to be trying to do.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
I can't agree. This goes to show how bureaucracy often gets in the way of better solutions. While I'm sure he can understand why compliance makes the government's job easier, it didn't make HIS job easier, so he had a valid concern. He had to bend to the government's will because they paid the bills however. Government is a lot of things but it's often the lowest common denominator solution.

paultopia 6y ago

^^^^^^. This x1000. Yes, it's bad when bureaucracy means that individual bad decisions are made. But casually saying "oh, well, this is idiocy, the government doesn't care about security" ignores the fact that organizing the regulation of human behavior is immensely costly, and the government needs to optimize on those costs. A good dev analogy is using a library function vs rolling your own. The government's library is the list of things that its own engineers approved. The equivalent of rolling their own is for some individual auditor to make an independent decision to deviate from the list. Now, it might be that you can squeeze out an extra tiny bit of performance[/the government can squeeze out some extra security] by rolling your own sort function or whatever, but most wise devs will balance that off against the risk of introducing extra bugs, the extra writing and maintenance time involved, etc. Reality is that this sucks. It would be amazing if it wasn't actually super-super costly to organize human beings to all point in the same direction and make sure that people don't cheat. Government would be a lot cheaper and more efficient. But, alas, reality does suck.

richardwhiuk 6y ago
Yeah - utterly agree. The point raised in the article is valid - but the correct thing to do isn't to persuade the auditor they are wrong, it's to push FIPS to include bcrypt instead of SHA2 (although as below, this isn't the right answer either - it should use PBKDF2 or similar).
- renewiltord 6y ago
  No, the right answer is to push no one on anything, comply with the FIPS standard and suck up the marginally increased probability of a breach. They made the right decision throughout.
- Nullabillity 6y ago
  You could also consider it a M&M test for both FIPS and the auditor. If they get something this simple wrong, what other issues lay hidden?
- tptacek 6y ago
  FIPS is never going to include bcrypt. Not including things like bcrypt is literally part of the point of FIPS.
  - wool_gather 6y ago
    Which aspects of bcrypt are you referring to by "things like bcrypt"?
    - tptacek 6y ago
      Modern, superior alternatives to standard algorithms and constructions. Canonical example: Curve25519. WireGuard, for instance, will never be FIPS compatible.
      - loup-vaillant 6y ago
        How then, can refusing superior alternative be anyone's point? Are you merely calling them overly conservative to the point of incompetence (I'd be tempted to), or is there another aspect to it?
        yencabulator 6y ago
        One angle to consider here is that FIPS is informed by whatever NSA knows about cryptography, so not all the evaluation criteria is public. You and I may think djb's inventions are superior, but for example NSA might have an active research project into elliptic curves, and refused to endorse Curve25519 until those results came in.
darkerside 6y ago
Great analogy. It is a frustrating end result in this case. I wonder if there's any possibility for escalating this to a regulator's technical resources? I wonder if this kind of thing is typically left to the auditor discretion.
jl6 6y ago
Yep. That which is globally optimal may be locally suboptimal.
bjeds 6y ago
I feel bad for the author for publishing this article. If your (the author) mindset is that "everyone else is an idiot", be it management, or regulators, auditors or some other group that is not your group (engineer?), then unfortunately you have an attitude problem. If furthermore you maliciously misinterpret the other group, saying "they want us to be compliant, not secure", based on misunderstanding the domain expertise _of your own group_ (!), then you are a liability to your business and should be kept at arms length from external auditors. Because the author clearly has no clue what he is doing, and based on his technical shortcomings he is speaking down on others who are _actually_ doing their job correctly: the auditors. Why is the author comparing bcrypt using 32 iterations with sha512crypt with 5000 iterations? Why not increase the sha512crypt iteration count by orders of magnitude if he want the hashcat test to fair equal or better under the testing methodology in use? Why is he using hashcat and basing decisions solely on that tool? Why is he using shacrypt at all and not a a proper KDF, such as PDKDF2, plugging in SHA2?
- feoren 6y ago
  You're criticizing the author for not adequately understanding the regulatory concerns but letting the regulators off the hook for not adequately understanding the engineering concerns. Frankly the latter feels more important and more beneficial (to everyone) to improve upon.
  - CaptArmchair 6y ago
    The author didn't relate how the exact conversation went down. The closest we get is this: > But the auditors were adamant. They did not care that the approved algorithms were weaker. Nothing would change their decision. That's the 100% the author's perspective. It's quite possible those auditors were aware of the existence of bcrypt and what it does. Even so, their personal opinions simply didn't matter. And they, quite likely, tried to point this out to the author. Yes, a stronger algorithm - bcrypt - existed, but as long as it wasn't a formally vetted FIPS approved algorithm, it simply wasn't an option for operational use. Compliance isn't bad in itself. It's a tool. Compliance is implemented to ensure that large and complex organizations can continue to function as a structured system. It helps ensure accountability, audit-ability, integrity, reliability, sustainability and other "abilities". There is a trade-off, though, when it comes to day-to-day operations. You simply can't improvise. In a large organisations, that's a good thing, which the author clearly hasn't understood. While the direct result is that their systems security is now weaker, that same compliance also shields them from any legal repercussions. If those systems get compromised, they can always point to the list of sanctioned algorithms and the oversight. That's how accountability works. You'll find the freedom and the flexibility to implement your own solutions in smaller organizations. However, that comes at a price: The buck stops at your desk. When something breaks, all eyes will turn to you in order to fix it. And there will be little to hide from. Of course, I'm well aware that there's more nuance to it. There are plenty of stories on both sides of the aisle were the lack of or very existence of formalisms either saved the day or directly lead to catastrophe. That doesn't imply that one is always better then the other.
throwaway316943 6y ago
You make government cheaper and more efficient the same way you do with code, by removing as much as possible.
- eximius 6y ago
  Cheaper is not always better.
  - sli 6y ago
    Likewise, neither is smaller. Code golf is just for fun.
tw25543818 6y ago
I think your analogy misses the most important benefit: you must use the government's library. If people were allowed to choose other libraries, then they might choose wrong. And since the government protects companies from the consequences of making bad choices, the government can't let them make those choices. The great failing of so many here is that they don't recognize that uniformity and centralization are more important than innovation. If those innovations really are better, then you can vote to elect representatives to nominate regulators to eventually change the requirements. This is how things work in a civilized society.

musingsole 6y ago

The regulator believing "this system isn't legible to us and so adds burden to our work" is roughly equivalent to the author's conclusion: "They want us to be compliant, not secure". The correct response to all of this would have been an accepted means for individual departments to submit requests for updates/changes to the standard to be voted on before they are forced to comply. The issue at hand is no mechanism for feedback. You can only comply or leave. This is the consistent failure of top-down governance.

CaptArmchair 6y ago
> The correct response to all of this would have been an accepted means for individual departments to submit requests for updates/changes to the standard to be voted on before they are forced to comply This would result in, what's pejoratively called, "design by committee" which inevitably comes with bike-shedding, tit-for-tat politics and so on. The NIST is an public institution with a long history which traces back to the origins of the United States. It's a formal part of the state. And it's raison d'être is to ensure that decision making around standardization actually happens. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institute_of_Standards_and_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institute_of_Standard... The point of all of this harkens back to fundamental principle: If you want to travel fast, go alone. If you want to travel far, go with many. The organization of a state catering to many millions follows the latter part of that principle, for better or worst. Standardization doesn't guarantee the optimal solution to a problem, it guarantees a workable solution for the majority of a given problem space. And that's exactly what public governance is about. Ensuring the continued existence of the state as a legitimate, legal entity that governs and serves public interests at large. > The issue at hand is no mechanism for feedback. Well, it's perfectly feasible to... just e-mail them or give them a call. The NIST ITL CSRC lab can easily be reached via their website. [2] If you want to know the decision making process that went into a standard, you can submit a FOIA request. [3] [2] https://csrc.nist.gov/about/contact-us https://csrc.nist.gov/about/contact-us [3] https://www.nist.gov/foia https://www.nist.gov/foia
- musingsole 6y ago
  That's cool and all, but this mentality creates animosity in the system's participants where it's unnecessary. You're focused on just the system's outcome and find NIST to be instrumental in delivering those outcomes. I agree. But that fails to address the unneeded stress on the system by antagonizing these isolated groups that have made decisions for reasons and have their own history. Appealing to this top-down system ignores how participating is dehumanizing even as its purpose is to serve the people. I'm arguing you can have your cake and eat it too, we're just choosing not to because decision making carries risks. We want to limit decisions to specific people out of fear of that risk, not out of respect for a system that has proven it's correct.

yodelshady 6y ago

Also, the core technical argument - that hashcat proves crypt is better than SHA2 - is weak. I could write a hashing function that looks good if you throw hashcat at it, but I wouldn't recommend you use it. I believe bcrypt is a better choice, but if I didn't I wouldn't have been persuaded.

whydoyoucare 6y ago

Very well said, and agreed 100%. It is crucial that this understanding be built to make the lives of both engineers and auditors simpler!

blargmaster42_8 6y ago

Lol... The state does not care about you! It's goal is power and nothing else.

saul_goodman 6y ago

I get it, the gov has a hard problem to solve. It's a case of both of them being right - the gov needs a common level of gradable security applied, and these folks are in an uncommon position of being able to test and prove that their choice is more secure despite not being a graded choice that can be approved. The auditors are not subject matter experts, they work for bottom dollar to ensure fiscal efficiency and only check boxes. The best choice is shouted down in the name of efficiency. This is also how smart folks will nearly always be chased out of government work. It's always safer and less work to make the dumb safe choice rather than the smarter choice that costs less or works better. This explains most of the big problems we have in government. We're not allowed to make smart choices ever, only mediocre choices at best, worst choices most of the time. How long can we sustain this line of behavior though? We can do it for quite a while yet, but eventually the overhead will kill the state in multiple ways. Of always making mediocre decisions in order to guarantee mediocre results.

Nullabillity 6y ago

Sure, it wasn't a particularly convincing test. But for this kind of standard to work, it has to be kept relatively up to date. It's not like bcrypt is a new one-off algorithm that they invented for this project.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago

> To the state, one of the most important goals is legibility. You're making the argument from the book Seeing Like a State. But the thrust of that book is that those practices lead to bureaucratic catastrophes like so-called "scientific forestry" -- which is exactly the author's point here in the context of security.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> The author doesn’t really try to identify from the regulator’s perspective The regulator qua regulator is remote from the narrative, which deals only with the auditors. Who don't even work for the same agency. The agency issuing the rules is concerned with compliance in a way in which actual security is not a factor which mitigates or alters, which is the conclusion made, and is entirely factually correct. The whole story is that important decisions are made extremely remotely (in all of time, organizational structure, domain, and concern) from the project. Now if this was an argument for a specific alternative, or even just generally against the practice without an alternative replacement, it would need to go farther and address whether the approach deals with different, potentially even more serious problems (corruption and/or ineptitude in over-empowered public agency managers, for instance) whether it was a net positive of negative in that context and whether, if it was a net positive, either the specific alternative proposed (if any) or any conceivable alternative would likely be a greater net positive. But that's not what this piece seems to be trying to do.

stjohnswarts 6y ago

I can't agree. This goes to show how bureaucracy often gets in the way of better solutions. While I'm sure he can understand why compliance makes the government's job easier, it didn't make HIS job easier, so he had a valid concern. He had to bend to the government's will because they paid the bills however. Government is a lot of things but it's often the lowest common denominator solution.