On 10/25/07, Bernd Petrovitsch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Mit, 2007-10-24 at 17:35 -0700, Ray Lee wrote: > [....] > > Key-based masterlocks are easily broken with freon, and their combo > > locks are easily brute-forced in about ten minutes. Yet, I'll still > > use them to lock up my bike and garage. > > The question is what the security threat is and the value of the secured > items. > > > The idea that poor security is worse than no security is fallacious, > > and not backed up by common experience. > > The common experience is, that common people just *feel* safer (just > because they have poor security).
Do you lock your bike up when you leave it lying around? My point is that real security comes in layers, not one perfect solution that will always work everywhere for everyone. The latter is a pipe-dream. > With no security, they know that there is no security. With poor > security, they do not know (or can deny) that they have next to no real > security. The fallacy here is to believe that just because they have no security, that it will *in*any*way* change their behavior. I deal with real users daily, and *they*don't*care*. Further, there's no level of education that we can instill into the community to make them aware of the issues and change their habits accordingly, because real users don't have the background to understand those lessons. While you can teach them that running an executable from someone they haven't heard of is obviously bad, they don't know why downloading an image is potentially dangerous, "it's an image, right?" "Well, there's these things called buffer overflows..." <eyes glaze over> Security is not an all or nothing game, it's layers. And we have to make sure that the layers are usable without taking a course from the NSA. I'd love to see a poll of the kernel development community to find out how many use SELinux on their machines, for example. > The prime example here is the usual (so-called) "personal firewall" on > Windows where people work normally as "administrator". So your argument is that if there weren't a personal firewall on Windows, that a significant number of people would then not run as Administrator? I beg to differ. Ray - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-security-module" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html