On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 8:20 PM, Tim Starling <tstarl...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > In a past life, I was a PhD student working on a broad military-funded > project which aimed to break all known asymmetric cryptography schemes > using large, expensive machines known as quantum computers.
There are more than a few asymmetric cryptography schemes that aren't known to be breakable by quantum computer. The popular ones (RSA, Diffie-Hellman) are all known to be breakable, though. On Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 11:06 PM, Tim Starling <tstarl...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > Well, a GPU is fast because it is massively parallel, with hundreds of > cores. Each core is typically slower than a CPU. I chose a function > which is non-parallelisable, so you'd expect computation of a single > hash to be slower on a GPU than on a CPU. But a GPU can calculate > hundreds of them at a time. Yeah, and attackers don't care about latency. They care about throughput. On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 8:16 AM, Tgr <gti...@gmail.com> wrote: > That is true for regular accounts, but with administrator access you can run > malicious javascript on a large number of machines or track the visitors of a > certain article. Correct. As I said, we should absolutely be requiring secure passwords for admins on all projects. Upon promotion, the user should be required to re-enter their password before they get access to elevated privileges, and change it if it's not secure enough. > A totalitarian government going after checkuser access is not > an unimaginable scenario either. We're unlikely to be able to foil a totalitarian government of any size. They can do things like intercept any connections to the site, providing a forged certificate for HTTPS via a CA they control, and steal passwords or cookies. They might even be able to reroute arbitrary traffic through their borders by serving false BGP information or something (I don't know enough about that to say). But they probably don't care that much about all of this, because they don't actually need things like evidence to bash down your door and execute you for treason. > That said, the two things that would make the most difference (and are also > much easier to implement) are SSL and password strength requirements. > There is no point in fancy stuff like SMS or asymmetric cyphers which > would be much more disruptive, a lot harder to introduce, and would > have less effect. We should definitely have HTTPS forced on for logins. And we should definitely have password strength requirements for admins. > Not to disagree with your general point, but that specific problem would be > easy > to handle by throwing a dialog with big red exclamation marks saying "WARNING! > Arey you REALLY sure you know what you are doing?" when one is about to turn > on > such a feature. (Or only showing the controls when the user selects > "expert mode".) "Are you sure?" dialogs are terrible UI. Users will often click through without reading them, or cancel without reading them, or read them and not understand them, or click the wrong button by mistake. Plus they're really annoying, since they interrupt what you were trying to do. It makes much more sense to remove the option and let people use the API or custom JavaScript or a browser extension if they want to use an external editor. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
