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Research: Even Password Complexity is a Tradeoff
Stronger passwords are always better—at least this is the working theory of most folks in information technology, security or otherwise. Such blanket rules should raise your suspicions, however; the rule11 maxim if you haven’t found the tradeoff, you haven’t looked hard enough should apply to passwords, too.
Begin with this simple assertion: complex passwords are primarily a guard against password guessing attacks. Further, while the loss of a single account can be tragic for the individual user (and in some systems, the loss of a single password can have massive consequences!), for the system operator, it is the overall health of the system that matters. There is, in any system, a point at which enough accounts have been compromised that the system itself can no longer secure any information. This not only means the system can no longer hide information, it also means transactions within the system can no longer be trusted.
The number of compromised accounts varies based on the kind of system in view; effectively breaching Continue reading
Weekend Reads: 071918
Another lesson is that privacy defenses don’t need to be perfect. Many researchers and engineers think about privacy in all-or-nothing terms: a single mistake can be devastating, and if a defense won’t be perfect, we shouldn’t deploy it at all. That might make sense for some applications such as the Tor browser, but for everyday users of mainstream browsers, the threat model is death by Continue reading
Site Reliability Engineering at the Network Collective
The Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) role often seems a bit mysterious to folks working at smaller and mid-sized companies, where the team isn’t large enough to separate into SRE, operations, and other teams. What does and SRE do, and how is it different from what the average network engineer does? In this Network Collective Off the Cuff, we sit with Michael Kehoe of LinkedIn to discuss the role of the SRE.
Complexity Sells
Networks are complex. But why? There are two fundamental reasons. The first is complexity is required to solve hard problems, specifically in the area of resilience. The second is that complexity sells. In this short take, I look at the second reason in a little more depth.
Thoughts on Impostor Syndrome
How many times, on reading my blog, a book, or watching some video of mine over these many years (the first article I remember writing that was publicly available, many years ago, was the EIGRP white paper on Cisco Online, somewhere in 1997), have you thought—here is an engineer who has it all together, who knows technology in depth and breadth, and who symbolizes everything I think an engineer should be? And yet, how many times have you faced that feeling of self-doubt we call impostor synddome?
I am going to let you in on a little secret. I’m an impostor, too. After all these years, I still feel like I am going to be speaking in front of a crowd, explaining something at a meeting, I am going to hit publish on something, and the entire world is going to “see through the charade,” and realize I’m not all that good of an engineer. That I am an ordinary person, just doing ordinary things.
While I often think about these things, what has led me down the path of thinking about them this week is some reading I’ve been doing for a PhD seminar about human nature, work Continue reading
On the ‘net: The Tradeoffs of Information Hiding
I recently joined Ethan Banks for a Packet Pushers episode around the trade offs of hiding information in the control plane. This was a terrific show; you can listen to it by clicking on the link below.
Today on the Priority Queue, we’re gonna hide some information. Oh, like route summarization? Sure, like route summarization. That’s an example of information hiding. But there’s much more to the story than that. Our guest is Russ White. Russ is a serial networking book author, network architect, RFC writer, patent holder, technical instructor, and much of the motive force behind the early iterations of the CCDE program.
