Jul 01

Usenix 2004: Wednesday notes

Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World

Bruce Schneier, Counterpane Internet Security, Inc.

  • Security is a tradeoff - is what we’re getting worth it?
  • Exacerbating factors for risk perception
  • Humans are notoriously poor judges of accurate risk levels
  • News media: constant repetition of rare events makes them seem far more common than they actually are
  • Technology: the world is increasingly tech-dominated but few people understand the details well enough to accurate judge the risks
  • Understanding security theater
    • Players & Agendas
      • Examples
        • Democratic national convention - Boston shutting down because the cost of getting security wrong is greater for city officials than inconveniencing ordinary citizens
        • KAL007
        • Security works best if the player making decisions is the best-placed and motivated party. Those "your purchase is free without a receipt” policies are security judo: with modern accounting systems the only way to defraud your employer is to avoid recording purchases in the first place (otherwise receipts won't match inventory) and these policies give the customer, who is the only person watching the clerk, a good reason to keep the clerk honest.

          • Linux Clusters

          • Low latency interconnects
          • Myrinet: $1000/port
          • Quadrics: $1800/port
          • OS-bypass GigE w/TOE card: 20µs
        • ROCKS
          • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 derivative
          • Diskless operation is not supported
          • System information stored in central MySQL server used by inventory, configuration, command-line tools, etc.
            • Kickstart config generated dynamically from MySQL based on requestor

              • Samba Guru Session

              • Samba IRC: irc.freenode.net #samba-technical
              • One-time NT migration already supported; 3.2 should have the ability to run as a BDC
              • IBM sponsored cifsvfs module for Linux 2.6
              • sangria: python framework for managing Samba installations and configurations
              • Migration is solid but some of the utility scripts may fail
              • Profile paths may need manual corrections
              • NT ACLs -> POSIX is a lossy transform

              Community Wireless BoF

              • http://www.wirelessleiden.nl/ has various technical notes, including some radio tuning tips.
              • Their network size is currently 30-40 nodes.
              • No SMTP (port 25). Use 465/587 w/SSL

              Solaris BoF

              • Sun’s serious about remaining a major OS vendor (“Solaris is running the company”)
              • DTrace rocks and Sun's really letting the, shall we say, more passionate kernel engineers evangelize the community
              • ZFS should eliminate the need for 3rd-party LVMs
              • Solaris will be completely open-sourced in the very near future
              • Sun’s getting serious about working with to the community. They have completely reversed the previous highly-restrictive policies limiting employee blogs, talking about internal projects, etc.