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Our Blogs Open Sauce Security is always a tradeoff: Schneier
Our Blogs Open Sauce Security is always a tradeoff: Schneier | Security is always a tradeoff: Schneier |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Wednesday, 30 January 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 4 While the basic tenets of security were simple, Schneier said that there were people with various agendas who would willingly create misunderstandings. For example, there was a lot of data showing that a national ID card would not be very effective but there were groups which had a stake in such a product who would spread misinformation. Featured Whitepaper
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Schneier touched on the so-called "lemons market" where the information available to the buyer and seller is asymmetric. He gave the example of a used car market where there were 1000 good cars and 1000 "lemons" or cars that were sure to give up the ghost after a short time. If the good ones cost $2000 and the lemons $500 and the price which an average consumer was willing to pay was around $1500, then more lemons would be sold. However if the buyer was in possession of sufficient information to distinguish between the good cars and the lemons, then more of the former would be sold. A seller could always increase the attraction of a car in either category by offering a six-month warranty - "he says take it, use it for this amount of time and if it breaks down bring it back." When it came to IT, people tended to decide about security based on various factors - the reputation of a company (here he cited the old mantra "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"), product reviews, certifications and so on. "For some, the fact that a product is open source is a signal that it is good, for others it is a negative; it works the same way for proprietary products," Schneier said. |
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