Either your vital communications are end2end encrypted already, or you have more reasons to worry than just KRACK.

• Endpoints are movable. There was a communication once performed via direct patch cord link. Next day it could go around half of the internet: someone decides to move one of endpoints to the cloud, to a different location, or else. And if you ever use your laptop or smartphone on the public wifi, the attack surface never changed for you at all.


• You cannot reliably protect all endpoints on an Ethernet-like network 100% of the time. Chances are, someone is sniffing you from a compromised device with much higher probability than he/she could get through (relatively) short KRACK vulnerability window.


• Do you watch your wired infrastructure close enough? Are you sure not just every network socket, but every centimetre of your network cabling is under control? Really? If your TV screen or printer in a public conference room is connected to the office network without 802.1x and VLAN separation, KRACK is not an issue.

Recently I took a somewhat deeper-than-intended dive into a wonderful world of so-called “secure communications” (don’t ask me why, maybe I will tell you eventually). No, not Signal or Protonmail, nor Tox or OTR. I mean paid (and rather expensive) services and devices you probably never heard of (and had every reason not to). Do the names like Myntex, Encrochat, Skyecc, Ennetcom ring a bell? Probably it does not, as it should be, unless they fuck something up spectacularly enough to hit the newspaper headlines (some of them really did).

Three lessons should be learned

FIRST, while experts are discussing technical peculiarities, John Q. Public is not interested in all that technobabble. This attitude constitutes a security issue in its own right, but at least it is well-known and we know what we need to do: to educate the customer about several basic, intuitive and easy for a non-technical person concepts — OPSEC, attack surface, threat models, supply chain security, encryption key life cycle etc. And then we leave everything «more technical» to a trustworthy independent audit.

Right? NO. Those people are not interested AT ALL (technobabble included), and they treat your aforementioned audit with the same amount of interest. And your educational initiative goes the same way since the entire syllabus you call «very very basics every human being must understand» fits comfortably into the category «technobabble» in the customer's world view. For them «Military grade security» is just as convincing as «we had a public independent review» — a little more than white noise and the former is still more than the latter. Let alone the popular opinion about audit: «You could compromise your security by allowing god-knows-who look into the implementation details! It was careless!»

SECOND, as “business” customers do not really care about technology, you cannot show them the trustworthiness of your solution by using the technological correctness of this solution. There is no common ground, no scientific consensus, no expert is trusted, everything is «my word vs your word», no audit is reliable (and that’s yet another reason nobody is interested in audits).

For your customers the very notion of «trust» implies interpersonal relations. They cannot trust anything but people. A piece of software being trusted? Or better still: trusted for a certain particular property? — those notions are not welcome in a businessman's brain. However, that may not be a detriment. In the end of the day we can not eliminate the «human factor» from the software as long as humans write it (with all the backdoors and eastereggs). Trust (as your customers understand it) is all about loyalty. Trust (as you understand it) is an expression of your knowledge of the software capabilities. Perhaps someone should stop abusing the word, and I suggest to stick to the older meaning. Get yourself a new word! On the other hand, the traditional loyalty-driven interpretation of trust leads to horrible decisions in the context of infosec. A catastrophic clusterfuck of any magnitude, is easily forgiveable as long as it is caused by mere negligence as opposed to sabotage. «Yeah, people make mistakes, but they did their best, yes? They TRIED!»

THIRD is that trust issues with people lead those customers into miserable situations, as they know people no better than they know technology, but for no reason they feel more confident in that area. Running a successful business (especially risky one, if you know what I mean) reinforces confirmation bias about knowing people. First you make a lot of money, and next day you get scammed by a Nigerian prince, a Russian bride or a fake crypto.

I guess I should write a separate essay about liability shift and self-preservation mechanisms that sometimes fail in unexpected way for unexpected people, but not now.

Amendment 28

The U.S. govt has no right to interfere with any aspect of public education, neither institutionalized nor irregular. It is prohibited for the govt to fund a school, advertise education services, impose standards or requirements in any way related to public education, limit educational activities in any way shape or form (for example: by demanding licensing).

Amendment 29

A teacher has an absolute, unrestricted, unalienable right to choose his students as he sees fit. A teacher is free to enroll and dismiss students on a whim at any time without answering to anyone or explaining his motives. The right of a teacher to freely select his students can not be limited by any institution, this amendment overrides any contractual obligations in this regard.

=================
Simple as that. No more laws and «departments» and «committees» are needed. You can even send your department of education to a re-education camp in Siberia.

And by the way, these two clauses are sufficient to return MALE teachers to the schools.

...is that they are NOT public.

Do you, dear public, pay for those schools?
You do… you pay exactly «for» but not «to». The schools actually receive money from the govt, NOT from you. And you have no control over the money distribution. When the money are given to the schools they don't bear your scent anymore — these are «govt's money» at the moment. The govt decides who takes the money, and for these money, a school has to appease the govt, NOT you. These «public» schools are indeed the govt's schools.

Americans seem to forget the old russian proverb:

Who dines the girl, he dances her.

— I have all three web browsers installed and I actively use all of them.
— WHY?! you are not a web-developer you do not need all of them.
— I need, I really do: when the antivirus blocks my Chrome, I have to use FF, and when it blocks FF, then I have to launch Opera.

Picture that: You are a farmer.
You have grown a ton of potato and brought it to a marketplace.
You recon everybody sells potatoes for $1 and you decided to set the price to 0.9 so that you can return home earlier.
Presently, a group of well dressed respectable men with baseball bats approached you:
— Nice potato you have here, good sir. Do you know that the minimum price for potatoes here is $1?

QUESTIONS:
1. do you believe these respectable men helped you sell your potato for a better price?
2. do you wish the minimum price to be set higher (e.g. $1.1)?

A few days ago I twitted this picture:


with a comment: guess what's wrong with this picture (hint: EVERYTHING).

Not everyone got the joke, so I think it deserves an explanation (sorry).


At a first glance it makes some sense and reflects quite common real world situation: first you start with some «one size fits all» «common sense» security (antivirus, firewall, vulnerability scanner, whatever). Then you get requirements (mostly compliance driven), then you do risk analysis and then voila, you get really good and start talking business objectives. Right?

Wrong.

It is a maturity level model. Which means a each level is a foundation for the next one and cannot be skipped. Does it work this way? No.

Actually you do some business driven decisions all the time from the very beginning. It is not a result, it is a foundation. You may do it an inefficient way, but you still do. With risk analysis. It may be ad hoc, again, depending on the size of your business and your insight into how things work, but from some mid-sized level you simply cannot stick to «checkbox mentality», you need to prioritize. Then you come with checklists and compliance requirements as part of your business risks.

The picture is all upside-down and plain wrong. I understand they need to sell RSA Archer at some point there and that's why they see it this way, but it does not constitute an excuse for inverting reality.

Undoubtedly we live in the age of false dichotomies… Somehow people are all talking (and fighting) about subjects with no substance.

Dear vaxxers and anti-vaxxers, your fight is ridiculous, and it is not because you are both partially right, it is because you are both completely wrong.

Have any one of you ever tried to DEFINE the subject of your debate? What do you think a vaccine is? And what to you think the category «vaccines» is? How can you make a utility/risk claim about ALL vaccines, piling together a smallpox vaccine that demonstrably saved the humanity and a flu vaccine that have never entered any testing whatsoever! Do these two share any INNATE properties at all? Can you formulate a property that all vaccines possess on their own, a property that can be observed in the vaccines themselves, all vaccines and nowhere else? This would be a characteristic property that gives you the least moral ground to speak about the «vaccines» as an object (entity). Until then, both of you vaxxers and anti-vaxxers, are engaged into a typical case of false entitification — there is no such entity «vaccines» that you pretend to be talking about. Therefore ANY CLAIM ABOUT ALL VACCINES IS GUARANTEED TO BE WRONG.

But there is still more hilarity in the «debate». Here is a logical scheme of the anti-vaxxer standing:

In a government-run hospital my child was given a shot, that was documented as vaccination. Shortly after the event the child became sick (as never before).

Let's assume we have a sufficient amount of the episodes like that (properly documented («there is no evidence» fanboys can go fuck themselves)).

How is this a reason to blame the sickness on vaccines? Let's control for all other factors… all those kids were perfectly healthy before the injection and so on and so on. If we determine beyond reasonable doubt that the sickness was caused by this particular injection, how is it a reason to blame vaccines? In order to blame vaccines on the ground described above, you must assume that the government-run hospital DID NOT lie to you about the injected substance!!!

So the anti-vaxxers' claim of the vaccines' malice is based upon the trust to the govt! The same govt that under a false pretense of vaccination and medical treatment injected kids with plutonium, gave people syphilis, created a polio outbreak (not even for scientific nor military purposes, just for fun). The govt that has broken the trust of the people over 9000 times, this govt the anti-vaxxers trust! — «govt said it was a vaccine, duh, vaccines are bad» — what a joke!

The deepest root of all the misunderstandings that constitute the InfoSec discourse nowadays is that the normal people («security experts» included) do not understand what is software, and its fundamental difference from the physical world we live in.

The entire realm of software is purely artificial.

Not only programs and functions, not only bugs and security holes, but also all the notions and intentions, all phenomena in the realm of software, even those perceived as «natural», are created by a man.

There are no natural laws that a program must follow and obey. While your computer does follow all the laws of physics, your programs do not at all. This very distinction makes a computer useful for us. The purpose and the only purpose of your computer's existence is to create a virtual TABULA RASA world, the world devoid of any laws, the world completely disconnected from the physical reality, the world that you are supposed to populate with laws of your own creation.

In other words, a computer can produce any output from any input — this is the definition and the characteristic property of a computer. This is what they always forget, and I stress ALWAYS.

REMEMBER THAT! If you want to improve your «safety», «cyber security», whatever. Every time you assume any expectation to a program of someone else's creation. Remember that! Every time you are disappointed: I gave this stupid machine a perfect input! Remember what a computer is: a machine that produces any output from any input — no restrictions at all. If you remember it well, first you will stop acting surprised when you wonder into a trap, second you will become more challenging prey, third you will stop believing InfoSec selling stories.