Prof. Alan Woodward is Wrong; The Internet is Fine

[Jackalope]

@Tiberius -

There's also the "brute force" method of breaking crypto or hacking passwords. You know, the one that uses a lead pipe and a rubber hose.

[Tiberius]

Ah yes, rubber-hose cryptanalysis. I prefer the russian variant: "thermo-rectal cryptanalysis".

[Doubting Thomas]

Not really. The whole reason the ciphers used to protect the Internet are secure is because they are developed by the most mathematically minded people on the planet, and take literally years to perfect. Public key cryptography (RSA, etc) is practically impossible to break due to the mathematics behind it, and the only changes we need to make are to increase the size of the keys every few years as faster hardware is developed that is capable of brute-forcing old shorter keys.

But the trouble is that idiots will still continue to use passwords like "12345."

Whenever you hear of a "hack" on the Internet, 99 times out of 100 it is down to human error, not some magical algorithm that can break crypto. Usually there are security vulnerabilities in the application being attacked, like XSS or SQL Injection. A lot of times social engineering is used to get sysadmin to turn off firewalls, or to get people to give away their passwords.

Right, which is why I say that even some new "totally secure" internet won't be totally invulnerable from hacking.

[5thHorseman]

http://cryptogasm.com/2012/03/prof-alan-...-is-wrong/

Please comment on the article, like it, share it around, etc. Would appreciate any effort to spread my blog around teh Internets!

Egham boys gonna bitch Guildford slags.

[Tiberius]

But the trouble is that idiots will still continue to use passwords like "12345."

That is irrelevant to the type of protection I am talking about, and what Prof. Woodward was talking about.

Right, which is why I say that even some new "totally secure" internet won't be totally invulnerable from hacking.

Like I said in the article, it isn't the protocols that are insecure; in fact most of them are based on some of the most secure algorithms we have. It is the applications (e.g. websites) that need securing.

Applications on the Internet get hacked; the Internet itself doesn't.

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Egham boys gonna bitch Guildford slags.

I'm a Reading man now.