A mini-ramble…
Someone said to me recently, “Trust is the root of all evil.” At first, I thought they were making fun of PKIs; however, they actually meant it quite broadly, due to the emotional blinding caused by the collapse of a recent relationship.
Their point was picking upon something I said in a ramble recently, namely that trust implies vulnerability and vulnerability implies risk, and agreeing with me. So, they claimed, if you remove the trust, you remove vulnerability. Done and done, they said, except, well, I disagreed.
First off, not all vulnerability comes from trust, which shoots holes right through this logic itself – trust can’t be the root of all evil, if all evil does not stem from trust. For example, a person can still rob you whether you trust them or not. And, trust itself can be used to mitigate risk, I think more so than it creates risk, which again brings to question the root of all evil sentiments, if trust does indeed prevent more evil than it creates. For example, family and friends can help you when you fall on hard times. (My ramble said “Trust is often at the root of an attack,” not “Trust is the root of all evil.”)
Every meaningful relationship revolves around trust. Trade requires trust. Marriage requires trust. You buy food and trust that it won’t make you sick. You put money in the bank and trust it won’t be lost. You tell your friends’ things that you would not want made public and trust them to respect your privacy.
Sometimes that trust is misplaced, but we make corrections and go on with life. Trust is not blind faith, and trust is not static. It is a metric, and it changes, influenced by experience. (This is much like security, which should be no surprise – security is built around trust.)
There are lots of inputs to trust – inputs like direct experiences, such as not dying when eating food from a particular restaurant or how you build friendships, or indirect experiences, such asking a friend about what plumber to use or credit ratings. We use these inputs to calculate levels of trust, which are basically estimates of how much vulnerability we are willing expose to the trusted. This leads to trade-offs, such as limiting the amount of trust you place in someone/something – you might only take a nibble of that unknown food to limit the risk of getting sick if it disagrees with you, or divide tasks amongst a group of people to limit the risk of any one person having too much access – versus the costs of these limitations – that nibble is not enough to meet your nutritional requirements forcing you to seek out additional food, and all those people/processes mean less work getting done. This is a balancing act, if you will.
Anyway, end of the day, I claimed the opposite to this person, saying “Trust is the root of all good.” It is what makes the world go round. It is the foundation of every relationship, personal and professional. And, it is what makes family, friends, and security possible. Without it, this world would be a far more dangerous place, in my opinion.
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As always, Metzger’s cryptography mailing list is a gem. This post let me point to some old material on here.
Now, the original SSL infrastructure was to verify that the URL that the user entered (into the browser) corresponded to the website that the browser was talking to (i.e. the website that the user thought they
were talking to was the website they were actually talking to). However, most electronic commerce sites fairly quickly found that SSL was costing them something like 90percent of their thruput. The result was that most websites transitioned to no longer using SSL for the initial user connection but reserved just for the payment process (to hide the account number
information). Now the user clicks on a button (provided by the webserver) which generates a URL (provided by the webserver). Now instead of checking the URL provided by the user against the webserver … most use of SSL now checks the URL provided by the webserver against the webserver (invalidating the original SSL security assumptions). lots of past posts about ssl digital certificate infrastructure http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subpubkey.html#sslcert
Bookmarking the https login pages for sites is a good way to get back to these security assumptions. I do it and recommended you do the same.
however, in X9A10, a detailed end-to-end vulnerability and threat analysis was performed … and divulging account information was identified as major exploit (requiring SSL to hide transaction information). However the majority of exploits had never been capturing information in transit (before SSL, even before the internet) … it had always been capturing information at end-points and/or logs of previous transactions. As a result,
a primary objective of X9.59 financial standard was to eliminate havesting/skimming of previous transactions as a (replay attack) vulnerability. The result was that X9.59 effectively “armors” every transactions … in effect replaces “privacy/confidentiality” as a countermeasure with “authentication” and “integrity”.
Reminds me of this diagram.
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Also via Metzger’s cryptography mailing list, five years to the month after Lucky Green spoke out and said no more to 1024 bit RSA keys, the gap continues to close on 1024 bit RSA keys.
We are pleased to announce the factorization of the 1039th Mersenne
number (2,1039- in the Cunningham table) by SNFS.
The factorization is:
2^1039-1 = p7 * p80 * p227 where
p7 = 5080711
p80 = 558536666199362912607492046583159449686465270184886376480100\
52346319853288374753
p227 = 207581819464423827645704813703594695162939708007395209881208\
387037927290903246793823431438841448348825340533447691122230\
281583276965253760914101891052419938993341097116243589620659\
72167481161749004803659735573409253205425523689
The factor 5080711 was already known.
Special and a few bits off, but getting closer.
[...] this other ramble of mine may have been criticized as naive optimism, but it also made this sort of [...]