Bruce Schneier Quotes About Security
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It's certainly easier to implement bad security and make it illegal for anyone to notice than it is to implement good security.
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Given the credible estimate that we've spent $1 trillion on anti-terrorism security
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The user's going to pick dancing pigs over security every time.
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Computer security can simply be protecting your equipment and files from disgruntled employees, spies, and anything that goes bump in the night, but there is much more. Computer security helps ensure that your computers, networks, and peripherals work as expected all the time, and that your data is safe in the event of hard disk crash or a power failure resulting from an electrical storm. Computer security also makes sure no damage is done to your data and that no one is able to read it unless you want them to.
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The fundamental driver in computer security, in all of the computer industry, is economics. That requires a lot of re-education for us security geeks.
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I am regularly asked what the average Internet user can do to ensure his security. My first answer is usually 'Nothing; you're screwed'.
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The question to ask when you look at security is not whether this makes us safer, but whether it's worth the trade-off.
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History has taught us: never underestimate the amount of money, time, and effort someone will expend to thwart a security system. It's always better to assume the worst. Assume your adversaries are better than they are. Assume science and technology will soon be able to do things they cannot yet. Give yourself a margin for error. Give yourself more security than you need today. When the unexpected happens, you'll be glad you did.
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If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don't understand the problems and you don't understand the technology.
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Amateurs hack systems, professionals hack people.
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The more we expect technology to protect us from people in the same way it protects us from nature, the more we will sacrifice the very values of our society in futile attempts to achieve this security.
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The whole notion of passwords is based on an oxymoron. The idea is to have a random string that is easy to remember. Unfortunately, if it's easy to remember, it's something nonrandom like 'Susan.' And if it's random, like 'r7U2*Qnp,' then it's not easy to remember.
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The more technological a society is, the greater the security gap is.
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If you ask amateurs to act as front-line security personnel, you shouldn't be surprised when you get amateur security.
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Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy.
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If someone steals your password, you can change it. But if someone steals your thumbprint, you can't get a new thumb. The failure modes are very different.
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Security is a process, not a product.
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The mantra of any good security engineer is: "Security is a not a product, but a process." It's more than designing strong cryptography into a system; it's designing the entire system such that all security measures, including cryptography, work together.
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Hardware is easy to protect: lock it in a room, chain it to a desk, or buy a spare. Information poses more of a problem. It can exist in more than one place; be transported halfway across the planet in seconds; and be stolen without your knowledge.
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A colleague once told me that the world was full of bad security systems designed by people who read Applied Cryptography
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Microsoft made a big deal about Windows NT getting a C2 security rating. They were much less forthcoming with the fact that this rating only applied if the computer was not attached to a network and had no network card, and had its floppy drive epoxied shut, and was running on a Compaq 386. Solaris's C2 rating was just as silly.
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People often represent the weakest link in the security chain and are chronically responsible for the failure of security systems.
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