Tag: Bruce Schneier

Stop Trying to Fix the User

Security Design: Stop Trying to Fix the User by Bruce Schneier

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."

Old (by Internet standards) but still relevant.

Surveillance Capitalism

Facebook and Cambridge Analytica - Schneier on Security

The first step to any regulation is transparency. Who has our data? Is it accurate? What are they doing with it? Who are they selling it to? How are they securing it? Can we delete it? I don't see any hope of Congress passing a GDPR-like data protection law anytime soon, but it's not too far-fetched to demand laws requiring these companies to be more transparent in what they're doing.

Surveillance capitalism has operated without constraints for far too long.

Facebook and Cambridge Analytica - Schneier on Security

The first step to any regulation is transparency. Who has our data? Is it accurate? What are they doing with it? Who are they selling it to? How are they securing it? Can we delete it? I don't see any hope of Congress passing a GDPR-like data protection law anytime soon, but it's not too far-fetched to demand laws requiring these companies to be more transparent in what they're doing.

Perverse Vulnerability

Perverse Vulnerability from Interaction between 2-Factor Authentication and iOS AutoFill - Schneier on Security

This new iOS feature creates problems for the use of SMS in transaction authentication. Applied to 2FA, the user would no longer need to open and read the SMS from which the code has already been conveniently extracted and presented. Unless this feature can reliably distinguish between OTPs in 2FA and TANs in transaction authentication, we can expect that users will also have their TANs extracted and presented without context of the salient information, e.g. amount and destination of the transaction. Yet, precisely the verification of this salient information is essential for security. Examples of where this scenario could apply include a Man-in-the-Middle attack on the user accessing online banking from their mobile browser, or where a malicious website or app on the user's phone accesses the bank's legitimate online banking service.

This often happens when convenience is part of the security design.