A case against security nihilism
Just the other day I suggested using a yubikey, and someone linked me to the Titan sidechannel where researchers demonstrated that, with persistent access, and a dozen hours of work, they could break the guarantees of a Titan chip[0]. They said "an attacker will just steal it". The researchers, on the other hand, stressed how very fundamentally difficult this was to pull off due to very limited attack surface.This is the sort of absolutism that is so pointless.At the same time, what's equally frustrating to me is defense without a threat model. "We'll randomize this value so it's harder to guess" without asking who's guessing, how often they can guess, how you'll randomize it, how you'll keep it a secret, etc. "Defense in depth" has become a nonsense term.The use of memory unsafe languages for parsing untrusted input is just wild. I'm glad that I'm working in a time where I can build all of my parsers and attack surface in Rust and just think way, way less about this.I'll also link this talk[1], for the millionth time. It's Rob Joyce, chief of the NSA's TAO, talking about how to make NSA's TAO's job harder.[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2021/01/hacke...[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDJb8WOJYdA