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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: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Monday October 03 2016, @08:44PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Monday October 03 2016, @08:44PM (#409644) Journal

    Yes. Blame the victim!

    If you take what the article says . . .
    * use simple passwords
    * click links in untrusted email
    * insert every USB stick you can find (into your computer of course)

    But don't try to change the user he says.

    Let's compare to:
    * lock your house at night, when you leave, and perhaps all the time even when you're at home
    * don't leave your house keys under the welcome mat
    * lock your car
    * don't leave your wallet on the hood of your car while refueling

    Those may seem like common sense -- but let's not try to change the user! Oh, no! Somehow, magically, the world should just be a safe place where bad people cannot take advantage of you.

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 03 2016, @08:50PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 03 2016, @08:50PM (#409648)

    On a computer, it's the IT guy's fault.

    * use simple passwords

    It's the IT guy's fault.

    * click links in untrusted email

    It's the IT guy's fault.

    * insert every USB stick you can find (into your computer of course)

    It's the IT guy's fault.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Tuesday October 04 2016, @06:50AM

      by maxwell demon (1608) on Tuesday October 04 2016, @06:50AM (#409839) Journal

      * click links in untrusted email

      It's the IT guy's fault.

      In this case, it's the software designers' fault. When email was new, people were making fun of the idea that an email could spread a virus. When the web was new, it was perfectly safe to follow any link you liked. Thanks to the combined efforts of Netscape and Microsoft, this is no longer the case.

      --
      The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
  • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday October 03 2016, @09:50PM

    by LoRdTAW (3755) on Monday October 03 2016, @09:50PM (#409687) Journal

    Which ones are taught to you in school and by your parents? No, I'll wait.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Tuesday October 04 2016, @01:13PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 04 2016, @01:13PM (#409965) Journal

      They should ALL be taught to you in school and by your parents.

      The article seems to be saying that the most sensible basic computer precautions should NOT be taught to you in school and by your parents.

      Go ahead and plug every random USB stick into your computer. If you receive an email from an unknown person advising you to download something cool and install it, then go right ahead!

      So on one hand, you should lock your doors because the world is unsafe. But on the other hand, when you use a computer, you should just leave yourself wide open to attack and do the most stupid careless things, because if you get hurt -- it's the software designer's fault for not making you safe! You shouldn't have to take any precautions or exercise any common sense.

      --
      People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 04 2016, @02:28AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 04 2016, @02:28AM (#409784)
    Clicking links in untrusted email and inserting random USB sticks shouldn't lead to pwnage! We have Microsoft to blame for that latter piece of brain damage, and unsandboxed scripting on web pages for the former. Using simple passwords though is more like building your house with an easily forced door.
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by bradley13 on Tuesday October 04 2016, @05:55AM

    by bradley13 (3053) on Tuesday October 04 2016, @05:55AM (#409832) Homepage Journal

    Not quite a fair analogy.

    - Simple passwords = Be able to use a simple lock on an ordinary front door, not the front end of a bank vault.

    - Click links in untrusted mail = Talk to strangers on your porch, without fear they are going to assault and rob you.

    - Insert USB sticks = Pick up a dropped envelope to find out which neighbor lost it, without worrying that you will be infected with anthrax.

    In this sense, the job of IT professionals is simple (difficult, but simply explained): create a sufficiently robust infrastructure that ordinary human behavior does not lead to catastrophe.

    While some security holes are very abstruse, essentially impossible to foresee (Rowhammer), many are just plain stupidity. I still see advanced students and young professionals write code that is open to SQL injection. "Oh, it doesn't matter for this project".

    The problems are manifold, but if we go all the way down to the bottom, the root issue may be the lack of any sort of verification of competence. We don't let amateurs (or incompetent professionals) design bridges, but what assurance do we have that the people writing kernel drivers know what they're doing? For all we know, they're script kiddies hired on the cheap. While any sort of global qualification body would be impossible (and likely corrupt), we could enforce qualifications through economics: If a bridge collapses due to faulty design, the company that built it will be held liable. The executives may even land in jail. Hold software companies to the same standard: Your IoT devices are spamming the Internet? Your company is liable for damages, plus getting those devices off of the Internet.

    --
    Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
    • (Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday October 05 2016, @04:41AM

      by meustrus (4961) on Wednesday October 05 2016, @04:41AM (#410502)

      - Simple passwords = Be able to use a simple lock on an ordinary front door, not the front end of a bank vault.
      - Click links in untrusted mail = Talk to strangers on your porch, without fear they are going to assault and rob you.
      - Insert USB sticks = Pick up a dropped envelope to find out which neighbor lost it, without worrying that you will be infected with anthrax.

      That looks like a great analogy to me, and unfortunately things can't be the same on the internet. Because people have always been able to do terrible things to you. The only difference is that now it's super cheap to send 10,000 copies of junk mail without having to pay the post office. You know it sure would have been different if the email system was designed to allow individual network operators to charge some micropayment for the privilege of forwarding that mail. I suppose the main reason they couldn't, besides ideological reasons, is that microtransactions over the fledgling internet were simply uneconomical. You would need Bitcoin as a prerequisite to bring the transaction fees low enough, which obviously the designers of email couldn't have had. So it will be forever free to send email, lowering the bar to entry for every shady business practice, with no profit incentive for cleaning up the bottomfeeders.

      And you know what? That's a good thing. We needed something as useful as email to make any progress on the internet, and its freedom has led to a lot of the success. Not that nobody pays for email. And it's a shame that it's not really possible to maintain a secure email server without the resources of a Google or a Yahoo. But wouldn't it be nice if the user of somebody with those resources was actually getting a fair experience? Without violating their privacy? With some semblance of market competition for the user's attention, not for the advertisers who are the real customers of the internet? If we can somehow eliminate advertising and the need for it, perhaps by making a more crowd-sourced information distribution system (like say SoylentNews or Reddit, or even more distributed like Diaspora), we could make the world a much safer place.

      --
      If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
    • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday October 06 2016, @02:59AM

      by urza9814 (3954) on Thursday October 06 2016, @02:59AM (#410936) Journal

      - Simple passwords = Be able to use a simple lock on an ordinary front door, not the front end of a bank vault.

      - Click links in untrusted mail = Talk to strangers on your porch, without fear they are going to assault and rob you.

      - Insert USB sticks = Pick up a dropped envelope to find out which neighbor lost it, without worrying that you will be infected with anthrax.

      Yeah, your *neighbors* are probably pretty safe. Physical distance provides much of the security of the real world. The internet doesn't have that. If you put Gates in his mansion in some slum in Elbonia he certainly wouldn't be stopping to talk to the neighbors on his porch or picking up dropped mail or using a standard household door lock. He'd be hiding behind big walls and armed guards -- assuming he doesn't do that already.

      On the internet, you are *always* a tourist walking through the worst slum in a foreign city at 3am. Because anyone, anywhere can attack you at any time. You can't behave as you would around your friends and neighbors and assume you'll be safe, because you *aren't* around your friends and neighbors, you're around a bunch of random strangers all across the globe.

      People *aren't* that trusting in the real world, and they shouldn't be online either. Consider how people still spread the stories about drugs and razor blades in Halloween candy every year. Even though it pretty much never happens. And even though if there's a razor blade in an apple, the whole damn neighborhood knows which house was giving out apples so it'd be no mystery who did it. The Internet is certainly less safe than knocking on neighborhood doors asking for candy, yet people so often don't think twice before doing the digital equivalent of shoveling down food from some anonymous stranger in Tehran. Sure, it's probably safe. But maybe they used contaminated discount ingredients, or it's expired, and they don't even know. Maybe it's been sitting unattended in the street for a week. Or maybe it's a big slice of Rohypnol pie.

      And how many times in this country have we detonated someone's underwear because they left their suitcase lying outside? We treat every random suitcase like a potential bomb, but when it's a digital suitcase attached to an email we should assume there's no way it could be harmful?