nanog mailing list archives

Re: Wireless insecurity at NANOG meetings


From: Kurt Erik Lindqvist <kurtis () kurtis pp se>
Date: Tue, 24 Sep 2002 23:58:22 +0200



PPS. I'm really really amazed at how people can consider any opaque system
    truthworthy.  Most computer users naively trust their secrets to
    effectively every one of thousands of Microsoft engineers who can
easily plant trapdoors. The same goes for trusting Intel. How hard it is for a CPU designer to plant an obscure bug causing switch to a
    privileged mode?  It is hard _not_ to create trapdoors like that by
mistake, even in much simpler designs (check the 30-year old report on
    Multics security).


I think it's even worse. Having traveled quite a lot in my previous job, I on one airplane realized that the person sitting next to me was working on the sales budget for one of our largest competitors.....

I once (also on an airplane actually) learned that most investment banks have a ban on their employees to use their laptops or in other ways work on airplanes. Make sense to me. But I keep breaching it.

- kurtis - / (...as I am sitting in the air somewhere over northern Germany)


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