Mythology About Security
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Mythology About Security
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Re: Mythology About Security
#2> We asked MIT whether we could incorporate Kerberos (and other encryption) into the X Window System. According to the advice at the time (and MIT’s lawyers were expert in export control, and later involved in PGP), if we had even incorporated strong crypto for authentication into our sources, this would have put the distribution under export control, and that that would have defeated X’s easy distribution.
Fascinating.
Re: Mythology About Security
#3So uh, why did you design X in such a manner that any client could sniff any other client's events and windows by default, and only later add a (quite inadequate) SECURITY extension?
This is what we mean when we say that the security model of X is obsolete, and an afterthought besides. The threat model was completely different back then: every griefer, troll, thief, and state actor didn't have a pipe straight into your X session through the browser, and for the most part X was used to talk to trusted programs on trusted hosts.
Wayland, by contrast, has a security model for the modern, hostile internet built in from the start.
Re: Mythology About Security
#4So uh, why did you design X in such a manner that any client could sniff any other client's events and windows by default, and only later add a (quite inadequate) SECURITY extension? This is what we mean when we say that the security model of X is obsolete, and an afterthought besides. The threat model was completely different back then: every griefer, troll, thief, and state actor didn't have a pipe straight into yo…
> any client could sniff any other client's events and windows
That's a feature that I have used many times in the past. Isolation should be handled at the X server level, where it can be handled without excessive complexity or require breaking backward compatibility.
> default
Locked down defaults and enabling features opt-in is good design. (Principle of Least Privilege)
> Wayland
Isn't compatible as it's missing required features (by design).
Re: Mythology About Security
#5"The choice for all of us working on that software was stark: we could either distribute the product of our work, or enter a legal morass, and getting it wrong could end up in court"
Is this not simply an economically expedient choice? To put the security and privacy of users below that of product distribution? How is this choice really different than any tradeoff a software company today makes about security?
Re: Mythology About Security
#6Does this matter? We (not just IT people, everyone in the world) always lack the imagination of what could happen, and every time we're caught off guard by the creativity of malicious people. Sometimes a government is to blame, but eventually it's just us. Again, security is a process and a never-ending game of arms race. When you stop playing, they'll get the best of you.
(Disclaimer: this is for the sake of argument. I'm actually a laid-back person and against government surveillance and stuff.)
Re: Mythology About Security
#7> We asked MIT whether we could incorporate Kerberos (and other encryption) into the X Window System. According to the advice at the time (and MIT’s lawyers were expert in export control, and later involved in PGP), if we had even incorporated strong crypto for authentication into our sources, this would have put the distribution under export control, and that that would have defeated X’s easy distribution. Fascinati…
Did they really have to include strong crypto?
Most secure protocols negotiate a cipher suite. They just had to add the ability to do so, and maybe some placeholder algorithm using the maximum allowed strength at the time.
Re: Mythology About Security
#8Can someone explain the US laws of export control around cryptography in layman's term?
Re: Mythology About Security
#9So uh, why did you design X in such a manner that any client could sniff any other client's events and windows by default, and only later add a (quite inadequate) SECURITY extension? This is what we mean when we say that the security model of X is obsolete, and an afterthought besides. The threat model was completely different back then: every griefer, troll, thief, and state actor didn't have a pipe straight into yo…
> any client could sniff any other client's events and windows That's a feature that I have used many times in the past. Isolation should be handled at the X server level, where it can be handled without excessive complexity or require breaking backward compatibility. > default Locked down defaults and enabling features opt-in is good design. (Principle of Least Privilege) > Wayland Isn't compatible as it's missing r…
BTW, i think SECURITY was to be a first step towards a more secure X. But nobody enabled it because it broke some big name programs (Firefox being one, supposedly)...
Re: Mythology About Security
#10Can someone explain the US laws of export control around cryptography in layman's term?
Paranoia