From security theatre to security cabaret, or why too much security is worse than none
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in People, Business, Identity, Futures, Security on
Security theatre is what security expert Bruce Schneier calls measures designed to make us feel safer that don’t actually make us any safer at all. He discussed the positive effects of this at the RSA conference this week; flying is one of the safest forms of transport and if having to take off your shoes and abandon your bottle of water make you feel that airport security is good enough to catch terrorists and you fly rather than taking a more dangerous method of transport, then the security theatre has made you more secure.
Here’s another paradox. Too much security makes you insecure. If someone in your company is emailing customer information to their Gmail account and copying market forecasts to their laptop and keeping old price lists for months after they’re out of date, it’s more likely that they’re just trying to get their job done on the road than that they’re stealing data to pass to a competitor - and that you didn’t give them a better way to do it. Make it impossible to do my job securely and I’m going to break or bypass your security so I can actually do my job.
The wireless network at the RSA conference was a good example of this. It was secure. Very secure. So secure that without the five pages of instructions I didn’t manage to get connected, and I didn’t meet anyone else at the conference who managed it either. If I’d wanted to hack into the laptops of anyone at the show, I wouldn’t have tried to steal them. I’d have set up an open free wi-fi connection on the show floor and everyone would have connected to that instead, giving me a great opportunity to see anything that didn’t go through a VPN.
Hugh Thompson of People Security has a good grasp of security and security theatre; you’ll have seen him if you watched Hacking Democracy, the documentary about the security problems with voting machines. He closed the conference with a chat show that ranged from a funny song about SQL injection (not a very funny song, but still) to Eric Drew’s tale of having his identity stolen by a lab technician at the hospital where he was being treated for leukemia and tracking the man down himself (a story Drew makes funny in the retelling that would have been a tragedy if he wasn’t in remission).
Thompson had a semi-serious conversation with Bill Cheswick, co-inventor of the firewall. Cheswick jokingly referred to malware as a “denial of spare time attack” that at least means you spend time with the family and friends who ask you to fix their computers. He was also slightly tongue in cheek when he said that he hadn’t used a firewall in a decade because he wants to use a secure computer instead; “it’s that whole crunchy outside, chewy centre thing; now we have much bigger liquid centres and once you’re past the outside you have access to everything.” But Cheswick also had some serious predictions to finish off Thompson’s security cabaret.
- “IPV6 has been three years away for the last 15 years. We’re finally approaching it - so all those firewall rules are going to need redoing. That will be fun…”
- “More attacks are going to come in through the browser so it may not matter so much what that the OS underneath is. You go to the wrong page, or the right page that has the wrong advertising agency - you did the right thing on your site but the other guy got hacked. To deal with that there’s going to be more sandboxes. I want users to be able to do everything online. I want them to run free in a sandbox. I used ASCII email for twenty years. ASCII email is safe but you want to be able click on the pictures.”
- “Computers are going to get better. We’re in the barnstorming era now. We’re going to look back and say ‘remember when you had to be careful about what you clicked on?’”.
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