CDR: Re: Schneier: Why Digital Signatures are not Signatures (was

[David Honig]

At 11:50 PM 11/16/00 -0500, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>On Thu, Nov 16, 2000 at 08:56:12PM -0500, David Honig wrote:
>> 
>> Herr Bear's two paragraphs below are among of the most clear, concrete
>> explanations of 'why security is hard/ crypto is insufficient' that I've
>> read.   Clear to a programmer, anyway.
>> 
>> But still, I think that the vast majority of users will end up
>> trusting something, and the vast majority will be well secured.
>> Most do not, for example, worry about black-bag jobs.
>> 
>> How many hardcore cpunks have reverse engineered the source
>> to the security apps they actually use?  PGPDisk *and* PGPfone *and*
>> PGP version whatever?  With time left over for SSL? And you do regular RF
>> sweeps too?   Do you work on your own brakes, too?  
>
>No, I don't do those things. I hire an accountant for my taxes, a
>lawyer for such affairs, a mechanic for my car, and so on. Modern
>society is build on trust relationships in a free market, combined
>with a division of labor.
>
>Crypto is subtle, true, but so is tax law, litigation, and modern
>automotive control systems. It is not in principle different from
>those areas, where money, property, and life is at stake, and we trust
>others to help us.
>
>-Declan

So it seems we agree, that most folks will end up trusting a gizmo
and/or code they haven't personally inspected.  The engineers' goal then
becomes to design [a range of] architectures that are as trustworthy 
and foolproof [1] as they can be.  (The lawyers' goal should be to get a
fair and reasonable legal infrastructure to support them, where
appropriate, e.g.,
crypto sigs.  The marketeers' goal is to figure out how to pay
for the implementation and profit off its use.)

[1] You can be foolproof and not trustworthy, but you must be
foolproof to be trustworthy.