3 ms·

I disagree. The author is trying to classify the actual value and sensitivity of data. I don’t agree with all of his assessments, but it’s a thought experiment

I disagree. The author is trying to classify the actual value and sensitivity of data. I don’t agree with all of his assessments, but it’s a thought experiment worth having. Crypto stuff is mostly bread and circus because the key isn’t controlled by the end user, and the end user usually isn’t qualified to handle the key. No commercial B2C service meets the standards required to store truly sensitive data, unless an informed user goes out of their way and has the discipline to do so. Encryption is emphasized because it’s critical to offering services, not because people need it or it does what we think it does. Losing the ability to have removable, storage that’s physically manageable created most of this problem for people, and the industry solved the problem that it created for us. Your medical records 20 years ago only existed in plaintext as paper in a folder in an office. Now they are in a document management system exposed to exponentially more risk. 9/10 times, the most secure backup available to an ordinary person is a USB key placed in a secure place in your home. Criminals can’t get it, and if the police are after you they need a warrant, service of which is known to you, and it easy to make copies, destroy or relocate it.

tptacek 4y ago
No, the point he's making (and you're making) is orthogonal to the question of whether data should be encrypted. In fact, he goes out of his way to make the point that encryption necessitates all-or-none access control that puts data at risk, suggesting the tradeoff isn't worth it for, e.g., wedding photos. That's whack logic. Manage the keys for your wedding photos so it isn't all-or-none. That's just engineering; it's not the binary question of whether you need to expose plaintext to make the security model work. Again: in serious cryptography, keys encrypt (or derive) other keys. You can have lots of keys, and you can unlock them lots of different ways.

tptacek 4y ago

No, the point he's making (and you're making) is orthogonal to the question of whether data should be encrypted. In fact, he goes out of his way to make the point that encryption necessitates all-or-none access control that puts data at risk, suggesting the tradeoff isn't worth it for, e.g., wedding photos. That's whack logic. Manage the keys for your wedding photos so it isn't all-or-none. That's just engineering; it's not the binary question of whether you need to expose plaintext to make the security model work. Again: in serious cryptography, keys encrypt (or derive) other keys. You can have lots of keys, and you can unlock them lots of different ways.