Abuse prevention is tradecraft
People get super confused about the differences between abuse prevention, information security, and cryptography.<p>For instance, downthread, someone cited Kerckhoffs&#x27;s principle, which is the general rule that cryptosystems should be secure if all information about them is available to attackers short of the key. That&#x27;s a principle of cryptography design. It&#x27;s not a rule of information security, or even a rule of cryptographic information security: there are cryptographically secure systems that gain security through the &quot;obscurity&quot; of their design.<p>If you&#x27;re designing a general-purpose cipher or cryptographic primitive, you are of course going to be bound by Kerckhoff&#x27;s principle (so much so that nobody who works in cryptography is ever going to use the term; it goes without saying, just like people don&#x27;t talk about &quot;Shannon entropy&quot;). The principle produces stronger designs, all things being equal. But if you&#x27;re designing a purpose-build bespoke cryptosystem (don&#x27;t do this), <i>and</i> all other things are equal (ie, the people doing the design and the verification work are of the same level of expertise as the people whose designs win eSTREAM or CAESAR or whatever), you might indeed bake in some obscurity to up the costs for attackers.<p>The reason that happens is that unlike cryptography as, like, a scientific discipline, practical information security is about costs: it&#x27;s about asymmetrically raising costs for attackers to some safety margin above the value of an attack. We forget about this because in most common information security settings, infosec has gotten sophisticated enough that we can trivially raise the costs of attacks beyond any reasonable margin. But that&#x27;s not always the case! If you can&#x27;t arbitrarily raise attacker costs at low&#x2F;no expense to yourself, or if your attackers are incredibly well-resourced, then it starts to make sense to bake some of the costs of information security into your security model. It costs an attacker money to work out your countermeasures (or, in cryptography, your cryptosystem design). Your goal is to shift costs, and that&#x27;s one of the levers you get to pull.<p>Everybody --- I think maybe literally everybody --- that has done serious anti-abuse work after spending time doing other information security things has been smacked in the face by the way anti-abuse is entirely about costs and attacker&#x2F;defender asymmetry. It is simply very different from practical Unix security. Anti-abuse teams have constraints that systems and software security people don&#x27;t have, so it&#x27;s more complicated to raise attacker costs arbitrarily, the way you could with, say, a PKI or a memory-safe runtime. Anti-abuse systems all tend to rely heavily on information asymmetry, coupled with the defender&#x27;s ability to (1) monitor anomalies and (2) preemptively change things up to re-raise attacker costs after they&#x27;ve cut their way through whatever obscure signals you&#x27;re using to detect them.<p>Somewhere, there&#x27;s a really good Modern Cryptography mailing list post from... Mike Hamburg? I think? I could be wrong there --- about the Javascript VM Google built for Youtube to detect and kill bot accounts. I&#x27;ll try to track it down. It&#x27;s probably a good example --- at a low level, in nitty-gritty technical systems engineering terms, the kind we tend to take seriously on HN --- of the dynamic here.<p>I don&#x27;t have any position on whether Meta should be more transparent or not about their anti-abuse work. I don&#x27;t follow it that closely. But if Cory Doctorow is directly comparing anti-abuse to systems security and invoking canards about &quot;security through obscurity&quot;, then the subtext of Alec Muffett&#x27;s blog post is pretty obvious: he&#x27;s saying Doctorow doesn&#x27;t know what the hell he&#x27;s talking about.