Author Archives: Bruce Schneier

Roger Grimes on Prioritizing Cybersecurity Advice

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This is a good point:

Part of the problem is that we are constantly handed lists…list of required controls…list of things we are being asked to fix or improve…lists of new projects…lists of threats, and so on, that are not ranked for risks. For example, we are often given a cybersecurity guideline (e.g., PCI-DSS, HIPAA, SOX, NIST, etc.) with hundreds of recommendations. They are all great recommendations, which if followed, will reduce risk in your environment.

What they do not tell you is which of the recommended things will have the most impact on best reducing risk in your environment. They do not tell you that one, two or three of these things…among the hundreds that have been given to you, will reduce more risk than all the others…

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Simson Garfinkel on Spooky Cryptographic Action at a Distance

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Excellent read. One example:

Consider the case of basic public key cryptography, in which a person’s public and private key are created together in a single operation. These two keys are entangled, not with quantum physics, but with math.

When I create a virtual machine server in the Amazon cloud, I am prompted for an RSA public key that will be used to control access to the machine. Typically, I create the public and private keypair on my laptop and upload the public key to Amazon, which bakes my public key into the server’s administrator account. My laptop and that remove server are thus entangled, in that the only way to log into the server is using the key on my laptop. And because that administrator account can do anything to that server­—read the sensitivity data, hack the web server to install malware on people who visit its web pages, or anything else I might care to do­—the private key on my laptop represents a security risk for that server…

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Are Automatic License Plate Scanners Constitutional?

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An advocacy groups is filing a Fourth Amendment challenge against automatic license plate readers.

“The City of Norfolk, Virginia, has installed a network of cameras that make it functionally impossible for people to drive anywhere without having their movements tracked, photographed, and stored in an AI-assisted database that enables the warrantless surveillance of their every move. This civil rights lawsuit seeks to end this dragnet surveillance program,” the lawsuit notes. “In Norfolk, no one can escape the government’s 172 unblinking eyes,” it continues, referring to the 172 Flock cameras currently operational in Norfolk. The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures and has been ruled in many cases to protect against warrantless government surveillance, and the lawsuit specifically says Norfolk’s installation violates that.”…

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No, The Chinese Have Not Broken Modern Encryption Systems with a Quantum Computer

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The headline is pretty scary: “China’s Quantum Computer Scientists Crack Military-Grade Encryption.”
No, it’s not true.
This debunking saved me the trouble of writing one. It all seems to have come from this news article, which … Continue reading No, The Chinese Have Not Broken Modern Encryption Systems with a Quantum Computer→