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posted by cmn32480 on Monday October 03 2016, @07:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the inherently-broken dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story from Bruce Schneier's blog:

Every few years, a researcher replicates a security study by littering USB sticks around an organization's grounds and waiting to see how many people pick them up and plug them in, causing the autorun function to install innocuous malware on their computers. These studies are great for making security professionals feel superior. The researchers get to demonstrate their security expertise and use the results as "teachable moments" for others. "If only everyone was more security aware and had more security training," they say, "the Internet would be a much safer place."

Enough of that. The problem isn't the users: it's that we've designed our computer systems' security so badly that we demand the user do all of these counterintuitive things. Why can't users choose easy-to-remember passwords? Why can't they click on links in emails with wild abandon? Why can't they plug a USB stick into a computer without facing a myriad of viruses? Why are we trying to fix the user instead of solving the underlying security problem?

Traditionally, we've thought about security and usability as a trade-off: a more secure system is less functional and more annoying, and a more capable, flexible, and powerful system is less secure. This "either/or" thinking results in systems that are neither usable nor secure.

[...] We must stop trying to fix the user to achieve security. We'll never get there, and research toward those goals just obscures the real problems. Usable security does not mean "getting people to do what we want." It means creating security that works, given (or despite) what people do. It means security solutions that deliver on users' security goals without­ -- as the 19th-century Dutch cryptographer Auguste Kerckhoffs aptly put it­ -- "stress of mind, or knowledge of a long series of rules."

[...] "Blame the victim" thinking is older than the Internet, of course. But that doesn't make it right. We owe it to our users to make the Information Age a safe place for everyone -- ­not just those with "security awareness."


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  • (Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Monday October 03 2016, @08:07PM

    by Scruffy Beard 2 (6030) on Monday October 03 2016, @08:07PM (#409621)

    kazzie hinted at the answer: You use USB for the keyboard and mouse. Apparently the old PS/2 ports were too complicated (separate incompatible ports for the keyboard and mouse: using the same connector *was* a little weird/awkward).

    What is worse, is that you do not even need to unplug the keyboard. It may act as a USB hub, depending on the model.

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  • (Score: 1) by toddestan on Thursday October 06 2016, @01:34AM

    by toddestan (4982) on Thursday October 06 2016, @01:34AM (#410909)

    Actually, I know at least with Lenovo you can still order many of their desktops with PS/2 ports, for the sole reason that once you get the mouse/keyboard off of USB you can now disable the USB ports to keep people from plugging things into them. They are also smart enough to detect whether it's a mouse or keyboard plugged in and adjust accordingly so it doesn't matter how you hook them up. Unless something has changed recently, they aren't hotpluggable though.