[PLUG-TALK] [PLUG] Equation may p0wn your hard drive

[Rich Shepard]

On Thu, 19 Feb 2015, Keith Lofstrom wrote:

> There is no perfect security. All you can do is hope to make the cost of
> an exploit (implementation plus retribution) unaffordably high, while
> remembering that accumulating cleverness always wins in the end. That is
> why secrets (like credit cards, or passwords, or supposedly secure
> hardware) should always have an expiration date.

   This is equally true in the non-digital world. Back in the early
Pleistocene, when the Army taught me how to pick locks (and manipulate
padlocks) the first think we were taught is that _every_ lock can be
defeated and security is achieved only by making the time to defeat it
greater than the time it is unattended. Even the massive Sargent & Greenleaf
padlocks we used on our classified file cabinets could be opened if we were
given sufficient time (generally measured in hours).

   Thanks for the insights on digital security, Keith.

Rich