Security quotes of the week

[Posted October 23, 2013 by jake]

So when you ask me to worry about a hypothetical attack where an adversary might be able to control all interrupt timing, and I'm dealing with an actual attack where the adversary (also known as the product manager :-) demanding that entropy collection be disabled, please don't be offended when I don't take you all that seriously.

— Ted Ts'o

Crypto without a threat model is like cookies without milk.

You're making a claim about the security of a cryptographic algorithm without specifying the threat model. You are, technically, in a state of sin. I forgive you my son. Your penance is to memorize another 30 digits of pi.

— Russ Nelson

Security quotes of the week

Posted Oct 29, 2013 12:56 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Russ was the one in the state of sin here: the guy he was attacking for not stating a threat model had spent the whole thread discussing threat models.

Security quotes of the week

Posted Oct 31, 2013 14:11 UTC (Thu) by robbe (guest, #16131) [Link]

I investigated Ted's claim that openssl does not use /dev/{u,}random by default on Debian.

That's probably because on capable systems, it uses rdrand instead, as is the case on one Debian stable system of mine. On older or non-Intel HW, /dev/urandom is used as expected.