kinds of computation?

Morlock Elloi morlockelloi at yahoo.com
Sun Mar 25 09:46:28 PST 2001


--- dmolnar <dmolnar at hcs.harvard.edu> wrote:

> 		1) untrusted and "impersonal" 
> 		2) untrusted but personalized
> 		3) trusted and "impersonal"
> 		4) trusted and personal

"Trusted" in "devices" generally assumes tamper-proofness (so that, once
certified, the trust is implied the next day, with some p close to 1.)

Brain is on the top of that list, ms windows at the bottom.

The top secrets reside in brain (passphrases), lower-grade secrets
(passphrase-protected) on electrical gadgets. The problem is the capacity
- both storage and computational - which drops as trustworthiness
increases.

I think that these tradeoffs are not well understood, too much is assumed.

On average, effective passphrase length is less than 60 bits. Yes, it's hard
to estimate what is the effective length of strings composed from personal
experience and published bits, but I have seen no data that would support
anything more than said 60 bits. So if 256-bit block cipher is at the end of
the security chain tha begins with 60-bit passphrase, why, OH WHY do we
bother ? I mean, even 56-bit single DES in ECB mode will stop all casual
harvesting.

We need to enhance storage capacity of the most trusted environments. This
ultimately leads to implants, with keychain items as an in-between step.




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