[tor-talk] Tor source code

[Seth David Schoen]

By the way, there's an interesting new study

https://www.ieee-security.org/TC/SP2017/papers/84.pdf

that claims that many people believe communications security is "futile"
because of inaccurate mental models of cryptography, and strongly
endorse security through obscurity.

I've been thinking a lot about these results (it's worth reading the
paper) and one way that I've been trying to conceive of it is that the
research showed that many participants thought that the developer of a
security technology must, inherently, always know how to crack or
defeat that technology.  This might be true at a technical level if
encryption always worked like a substitution cipher, where there is no
secret key but knowledge of the details of the cipher is equivalent to
knowing how to crack it, or if public key cryptography didn't exist,
so that many-to-many communications required trusted authorities to
distribute key material.

Participants in that study did not tend to feel that encryption software
ought to be open source because they seemed to believe that the
developer of a security tool inherently, so to speak, knows the code
and can always use that knowledge to break users' security.  In this
model other motivated attackers will gradually also learn the secret
knowledge that they need to break the system, but disclosing technical
details of how it works would be an especially bad idea because it would
greatly speed up the process for the attackers.  (Then security through
obscurity is understood to be the only possible form of security.)

The study suggests that an important challenge for developers of security
systems may be finding a way to communicate how security need not depend
on obscurity, and also need not depend on trusting inventors of security
systems to keep secrets.

-- 
Seth Schoen  <schoen at eff.org>
Senior Staff Technologist                       https://www.eff.org/
Electronic Frontier Foundation                  https://www.eff.org/join
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