Secruit should depend on the impact [LWN.net]

Secruit should depend on the impact

Posted May 9, 2008 2:54 UTC (Fri) by dps (subscriber, #5725)
Parent article: Cryptographic splicing makes for a Wordpress vulnerability

What the Murdoch paper fails to say is that what security you need depends on the impact of
breaking the scheme. If someone steals a LWN cookie or WSJ cookie the marginal cost of
shipping the bits to them too is presumably minimal.

If you are thinking of online banking, stock trading or another system where the impact can be
large then you probably want something stronger than what is proposed. It is easy to ensure
that cookies only work once if you have a database table that maps cookie values to user
names.

Some banks think that things like SecurID's tokens are worth the money.

FYI you can throw money at the SSL performance problem. An outfit called nCipher sells gigabit
ethernet adapters with both TCP and SSL done on the hardware. Disclaimer: nCipher will be
employing me in the near future :-)

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Secruit should depend on the impact

Posted May 10, 2008 15:42 UTC (Sat) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link]

It seems like foolish economy to not worry about doing things right when the cost of doing
things right is cheap. As for LWN, that's assuming that none of the administrator groups have
magic powers, and it's also assuming that the cost of letting people masquerade as other
people is minimal, which it arguably isn't.