Bruce Schneier Quotations

It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state.

There are two types of encryption: one that will prevent your sister from reading your diary and one that will prevent your government.

If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don't understand the problems and you don't understand the technology.

You can't defend. You can't prevent. The only thing you can do is detect and respond.

I am regularly asked what the average Internet user can do to ensure his security. My first answer is usually 'Nothing; you're screwed'.

When a big company lays you off, they often give you a year's salary to 'go pursue a dream.' If you're stupid, you panic and get another job. If you're smart, you take the money and use the time to figure out what you want to do next.

Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy our country's way of life; it's only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage.

No one can duplicate the confidence that RSA offers after 20 years of cryptanalytic review.

People don't understand computers. Computers are magical boxes that do things. People believe what computers tell them.

When people are scared, they need something done that will make them feel safe, even if it doesn't truly make them safer. Politicians naturally want to do something in response to crisis, even if that something doesn't make any sense. But unfortunately for politicians, the security measures that work are largely invisible.

The user's going to pick dancing pigs over security every time.

Think of your existing power as the exponent in an equation that determines the value of information. The more power you have, the more additional power you derive from the new data.

There's an entire flight simulator hidden in every copy of Microsoft Excel 97.

Air travel survived decades of terrorism, including attacks which resulted in the deaths of everyone on the plane. It survived 9/11. It'll survive the next successful attack. The only real worry is that we'll scare ourselves into making air travel so onerous that we won't fly anymore.

It's frustrating; terrorism is rare and largely ineffectual, yet we regularly magnify the effects of both their successes and failures by terrorizing ourselves.

Computer security can simply be protecting your equipment and files from disgruntled employees, spies, and anything that goes bump in the night, but there is much more. Computer security helps ensure that your computers, networks, and peripherals work as expected all the time, and that your data is safe in the event of hard disk crash or a power failure resulting from an electrical storm. Computer security also makes sure no damage is done to your data and that no one is able to read it unless you want them to.

Microsoft knows that reliable software is not cost effective. According to studies, 90% to 95% of all bugs are harmless. They're never discovered by users, and they don't affect performance. It's much cheaper to release buggy software and fix the 5% to 10% of bugs people find and complain about.

ID can be hijacked, and cards can be faked. All of the 9/11 terrorists had fake IDs, yet they still got on the planes. If the British national ID card can't be faked, it will be the first on the planet.

Privacy is a fundamental human need

I tell people if it's in the news don't worry about it. Because by definition news is something that almost never happens.

It doesn't matter how good the card is if the issuance process is flawed.

if anyone thinks they can get an accurate picture of anyplace on the planet by reading news reports, they're sadly mistaken.

Technical problems can be remediated. A dishonest corporate culture is much harder to fix.

Only amateurs attack machines; professionals target people.

Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers. Seems like you can scare any public into allowing the government to do anything with those four.

Buy American Doesn’t Sell Well Anymore Because It Means Give A Copy To The NSA

It's certainly easier to implement bad security and make it illegal for anyone to notice than it is to implement good security.

Microsoft made a big deal about Windows NT getting a C2 security rating. They were much less forthcoming with the fact that this rating only applied if the computer was not attached to a network and had no network card, and had its floppy drive epoxied shut, and was running on a Compaq 386. Solaris's C2 rating was just as silly.

Given the credible estimate that we've spent $1 trillion on anti-terrorism security

Terrorists can only take my life. Only my government can take my freedom.

Something that looks like a protocol but does not accomplish a task is not a protocol—it’s a waste of time.

Societies without a reservoir of people who don't follow the rules lack an important mechanism for societal evolution. Vibrant societies need a dishonest minority; if society makes its dishonest minority too small, it stifles dissent as well as common crime.

Digital files cannot be made uncopyable, any more than water can be made not wet.

When my mother gets a prompt 'Do you want to download this?' she's going to say yes. It's disingenuous for Microsoft to give you all of these tools with which to hang yourself, and when you do, then say it's your fault.

Chaos is hard to create, even on the Internet.

This is not the internet the world needs, or the internet its creators envisioned. We need to take it back. And by we, I mean the engineering community.

Surveillance is the business model of the Internet.

It is insufficient to protect ourselves with laws; we need to protect ourselves with mathematics.

Cryptography products may be declared illegal, but the information will never be

It is sort of interesting that in our society this days we are very quick to apply the term 'war' to places where thare are no actual wars, and loath to apply the term 'war' when we are actually fighting wars.

We no longer know whom to trust. This is the greatest damage the NSA has done to the Internet, and will be the hardest to fix.

The question to ask when you look at security is not whether this makes us safer, but whether it's worth the trade-off.

If you ask amateurs to act as front-line security personnel, you shouldn't be surprised when you get amateur security.

Surveillance of power is one of the most important ways to ensure that power does not abuse its status. But, of course, power does not like to be watched.

Why is it that we all - myself included - believe these stories? Why are we so quick to assume that the TSA is a bunch of jack-booted thugs, officious and arbitrary and drunk with power? It's because everything seems so arbitrary, because there's no accountability or transparency in the DHS.

Metadata equals surveillance; it's that simple.

Secret courts making secret rulings on secret laws, and companies flagrantly lying to consumers about the insecurity of their products and services, undermine the very foundations of our society.

If the FBI parks a van bristling with cameras outside your house, you are justified in closing your blinds.

But in this country, while you have to be competent to pull off a terrorist attack, you don't have to be competent to cause terror. All you need to do is start plotting an attack and - regardless of whether or not you have a viable plan, weapons or even the faintest clue - the media will aid you in terrorizing the entire population.

Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy.

A colleague once told me that the world was full of bad security systems designed by people who read Applied Cryptography

Choosing providers is not a choice between surveillance/not; it's just choosing which feudal lord gets to spy on you.

Corporate and government surveillance aren't separate; they're an alliance of interests.

We can't keep weapons out of prisons; we can't possibly expect to keep them out of airports.

Terrorism is a crime against the mind. We win by refusing fear.

Chaos is hard to create, even on the Internet. Here's an example. Go to Amazon.com. Buy a book without using SSL. Watch the total lack of chaos.

The very definition of news is something that hardly ever happens. If an incident is in the news, we shouldn't worry about it. It's when something is so common that its no longer news - car crashes, domestic violence - that we should worry.

Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can't break.

The more we expect technology to protect us from people in the same way it protects us from nature, the more we will sacrifice the very values of our society in futile attempts to achieve this security.

There are two kinds of cryptography in this world: cryptography that will stop your kid sister from reading your files, and cryptography that will stop major governments from reading your files.

Security is a process, not a product.

The whole notion of passwords is based on an oxymoron. The idea is to have a random string that is easy to remember. Unfortunately, if it's easy to remember, it's something nonrandom like 'Susan.' And if it's random, like 'r7U2*Qnp,' then it's not easy to remember.

The fundamental driver in computer security, in all of the computer industry, is economics. That requires a lot of re-education for us security geeks.

History has taught us: never underestimate the amount of money, time, and effort someone will expend to thwart a security system. It's always better to assume the worst. Assume your adversaries are better than they are. Assume science and technology will soon be able to do things they cannot yet. Give yourself a margin for error. Give yourself more security than you need today. When the unexpected happens, you'll be glad you did.

The more technological a society is, the greater the security gap is.

The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act. And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want [...] Our politicians help the terrorists every time they use fear as a campaign tactic. The press helps every time it writes scare stories about the plot and the threat. And if we're terrified, and we share that fear, we help.

If someone steals your password, you can change it. But if someone steals your thumbprint, you can't get a new thumb. The failure modes are very different.

Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.

Trying to make bits uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet. The sooner people accept this, and build business models that take this into account, the sooner people will start making money again.

People often represent the weakest link in the security chain and are chronically responsible for the failure of security systems.

Hardware is easy to protect: lock it in a room, chain it to a desk, or buy a spare. Information poses more of a problem. It can exist in more than one place; be transported halfway across the planet in seconds; and be stolen without your knowledge.

Terrorism isn't a crime against people or property. It's a crime against our minds, using the death of innocents and destruction of property to make us fearful. Terrorists use the media to magnify their actions and further spread fear. And when we react out of fear, when we change our policy to make our country less open, the terrorists succeed -- even if their attacks fail. But when we refuse to be terrorized, when we're indomitable in the face of terror, the terrorists fail -- even if their attacks succeed.

Don't make the mistake of thinking you're Facebook's customer, you're not – you're the product,

More people are killed every year by pigs than by sharks, which shows you how good we are at evaluating risk.

For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that-either now or in the uncertain future-patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.

The mantra of any good security engineer is: 'Security is a not a product, but a process.' It's more than designing strong cryptography into a system; it's designing the entire system such that all security measures, including cryptography, work together.

Amateurs hack systems, professionals hack people.

Looks like kindergarten cryptography to me. It will keep your kid sister out, but it won't keep the police out. But what do you expect from someone who is computer illiterate?

Setting the default to dangerous doesn't work in any other industry.

Network security sucks, and there's not much the school administration can do. Somebody who knows how will break in.

ID can be hijacked, and cards can be faked. All of the 9/11 terrorists had fake IDs, yet they still got on the planes. If the British national ID card can't be faked, it will be the first on the planet.

What you and I are saying is much less important than the fact that you and I are talking. Against traffic analysis, encryption is irrelevant.

What will happen when the CFO looks at his premium and realizes that it will go down 50 percent if he gets rid of all his insecure Windows operating systems and replaces them with a secure version of Linux? The choice of which operating system to use will no longer be 100 percent technical, ... Microsoft, and other companies with shoddy security, will start losing sales because companies don't want to pay the insurance premiums.

Mark is one of the more respected people out there doing this kind of work,

Microsoft's operating system was never designed with security in mind. For Microsoft, security is always an afterthought.

We don?t have a field in the database system that will say you're an evildoer.

Using current mathematics and technology, it is impossible to even consider factoring a 1024-bit number. I'm not willing to make any hard predictions about tomorrow.

We could ground all airplanes and not have any more airplane crashes, ... The key is whether the good uses of the Net outweigh the bad. Life is like that. You just have to take the good with the bad.

The real threat is fraud due to impersonation, and the tactics of impersonation will change in response to the defenses. Two-factor authentication will force criminals to modify their tactics, that's all. In the long term, all it does is move the bad guys to a new tactic.

We'd be crazy to assume that the bad guys aren't thinking of this.

We all think of the movie scenarios - the kinds of things that we would expect to see in a movie plot. Terrorists sneaking a bomb into the Super Bowl, for example. The problem is, terrorists don't care. They don't care whether it's a football game or an airport or a restaurant or a movie theater. It doesn't matter to them.

You have to make the entity in the position to solve the problem, responsible for the problem. Otherwise, it doesn't get solved.

Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.

There's one important aspect of this fingerprint that the article did not talk about: how easy is it to forge? Can someone analyze 100 images from a given camera, and then doctor a pre-existing picture so that it appeared to come from that camera?

Sounds like a protection racket, doesn't it? ... It is a protection racket.

During the Clinton years, we were fighting that kangaroo court - they never said no. Here we are now wishing for the little oversight that the court had.

The way to fix this is we need a better ability to know where to look. It's the drinking out of the fire hose problem. Turning up the fire hose isn't going to help.

The years of the military being at the leading edge of technology are gone because it moves so fast. In the real world, the rise of technology means that everyone has access to the exact same stuff. The limitations are basically just money. He (bin Laden) definitely has more money than the average terrorist.

They're saying, 'We use this impressive lock on our screen door. Nobody's going to pick it.' Instead, they're going to take a rock and scissors and cut out the screen,

At best, you're going to slow them down - if you're lucky. Because what you see at stadiums is completely ineffective.