32 lines
2.0 KiB
Plaintext
32 lines
2.0 KiB
Plaintext
security through obscurity
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(alt.: security by obscurity ) A term applied by hackers to most OS vendors'
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favorite way of coping with security holes namely, ignoring them,
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documenting neither any known holes nor the underlying security algorithms,
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trusting that nobody will find out about them and that people who do find
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out about them won't exploit them. This strategy never works for long and
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occasionally sets the world up for debacles like the RTM worm of 1988 (see
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Great Worm ), but once the brief moments of panic created by such events
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subside most vendors are all too willing to turn over and go back to sleep.
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After all, actually fixing the bugs would siphon off the resources needed to
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implement the next user-interface frill on marketing's wish list and
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besides, if they started fixing security bugs customers might begin to
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expect it and imagine that their warranties of merchantability gave them
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some sort of right to a system with fewer holes in it than a shotgunned
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Swiss cheese, and then where would we be? Historical note: There are
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conflicting stories about the origin of this term. It has been claimed that
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it was first used in the Usenet newsgroup comp.sys.apollo during a campaign
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to get HP/Apollo to fix security problems in its Unix- clone Aegis/DomainOS
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(they didn't change a thing). ITS fans, on the other hand, say it was coined
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years earlier in opposition to the incredibly paranoid Multics people down
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the hall, for whom security was everything. In the ITS culture it referred
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to (1) the fact that by the time a tourist figured out how to make trouble
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he'd generally gotten over the urge to make it, because he felt part of the
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community; and (2) (self-mockingly) the poor coverage of the documentation
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and obscurity of many commands. One instance of deliberate security through
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obscurity is recorded; the command to allow patching the running ITS system
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(escape escape control-R) echoed as $$^D. If you actually typed alt alt ^D,
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that set a flag that would prevent patching the system even if you later got
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it right.
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