Infosec 08: Let’s Look Back
April 24th, 2008 by Jiri
Fred Piper, 23rd April
Another enjoyable retrospective from one of the key people who were at the birth of UK security education. By my laptop ran out of power and I could not take notes, but two interesting poits presenting two interesting paradoxes remained in my head.
The first was that every project has a range of consequences which are either intentional or unintentional, and which have a various degree of desirability. Because desirability is subjective, things like surveillance will always draw disagreeing views.
The second point was tha related to cryptography. Cryptosystems were originally designed with a view that the interceptor is the bad guy, but in last decade that got reversed. Today cryptography is used to protect the information of good guys from the bad guys, but equally the bad guys (e.g. crime) are using it protect against good guys. Who is good and who is bad is to an extent in the eye of a beholder. This not only leads to endless discussions (mostly about the feelings and models in Schneier’s words) but this also leads to the fact that the crypto solutions can never perfectly reconcile these two perspectives.
Overall rating: 3.5/5