Comment by awesome_dude
4 hours ago
There's absolutely no way to account for humans, who can be tricked, or pressured, or just make human sized mistakes.
4 hours ago
There's absolutely no way to account for humans, who can be tricked, or pressured, or just make human sized mistakes.
Then there's no such thing as security.
By the way, there are countless ways to account for humans. There are entire branches of engineering devoted to this. If you don't want someone to leave the bank with a pen customers use for signing checks, you just chain it to the desk. If you don't want the installer to forget to put the pen-chain in, make a photo of the chain part of the checklist required to get paid. If you want to... etc.
The idea is that you determine an acceptable level of risk, then secure to that level. Maybe the acceptable level of risk chosen by companies is wrong. Maybe we need to increase that risk exposure via heavier fines and regulations. Maybe the cost of reducing that risk is too high already. Maybe we need to fund that. Maybe it's too confusing and we need to research better standard practices. I dunno. But this is not some unsolvable problem.
Again, of course there is.
Decades ago, I worked in a bank in an old building. The door had a card reader for access. You boop your card and the door opened. People would hold the door open for each other all the time out of politeness, even when they didn't know each other. Security told us not to do that, but it's hard to convince people to stop being polite.
I had a laptop stolen from my desk in a place like that once. (Not a bank - but similar door-card reader system). This guy came in in the middle of the day, wearing overalls. He confidently walked through the door after someone, like he belonged there. He walked up to my desk, swiped my laptop and just strolled out.
At the bank, they've replaced the door with mechanical gates and a security guard. The gates - physically - only let one person to walk through at a time. You can't hold a gate open any more. And the security guards stop anyone who tries.
Is it 100% foolproof? No. But it's way more secure. It would have stopped that laptop thief.
There's this pernicious, defeatist attitude that if you can't make a system 100% secure, so you shouldn't try. That's misguided. Most systems can be made orders of magnitude more secure than they are today. It just takes a bit of care and work.
As soon as you make something foolproof, the universe evolves a better fool
Fine. Make the universe work for it. The whole system becomes more resilient as a result.
Look at our immune system. Incredibly complex and clever, and able to keep us alive in the face of all sorts of pathogens. It exists because of this cat and mouse game, played over millions of years.
There's people in the highlands of PNG who regularly eat each other. Of course, many are thought to have died due to prion diseases. But now these tribespeople seem to have become largely immune to prion disease. Incredible.
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This is the key truth that we keep forgetting
In cryptography there are protocols that account for malicious actors