Short session expiration does not help security
&gt; Also, it would be better to protect against this by securing the logs or using hard drive encryption.<p>This one line is emblematic of the flaws in the article.<p>My take on the article is, “Imagine that everything else in a system is done correctly, and the system, overall, is perfectly secure. In this imaginary world, short sessions don’t help.”<p>One fact about security which you cannot avoid is that any one particular security feature may fail or be bypassed in some way. What are the consequences of this? Well, it means that you want multiple layers of security. Your server runs its daemons with minimal privileges so that a remote execution vulnerability needs to be combined with a privilege escalation vulnerability. You don’t think about the “right way” to secure something, but you think about multiple ways to secure something, and don’t stop securing it just because you’ve found one good option.<p>Short sessions are there because there are various ways that sessions <i>could</i> be compromised.