[Cryptography] Secure erasure

alex at alten.org alex at alten.org
Sun Sep 11 21:32:59 EDT 2016


Quoting Peter Gutmann <pgut001 at cs.auckland.ac.nz>:
> Jerry Leichter <leichter at lrw.com> writes:
>
>> Frankly ... I don't see it happening.  The demand is simply not there.  The
>> sophisticated attacks we talk about here are *not* how hacking is  
>> done today.
>> We haven't even seen evidence of the government actors going that  
>> far.  There
>> are way too many easier attacks.
>
..
> (the latter was just a re-stating in the context of Ian's quote of Shamir's
> Law that crypto is bypassed, not attacked).
>

This is so true.  After having spent several years with (legal) cyber-hacking
teams, I almost don't care about crypto anymore.

I'm far more worried about securing application code and OS kernel code as
much as possible without any real support in hardware or a real reference
monitor (for the latter case except possibly the more recent iOS/iPhone).

To me the question is how to better secure the app tool chain processes
effectively to reduce attack surfaces (like ASLR compiler flags, stack
canaries, usage of more secure Clib calls, etc.), to (methodically)
re-engineer kernels (and maybe silicon) to also reduce their attack surfaces.

And to have good monitoring and analysis tools (Netflix's FIDO comes to mind)
without overwhelming that person with false positives or huge amounts of
data (like using topographical data analysis, e.g. the Python Mapper open
source).

- Alex




More information about the cryptography mailing list