Fergie's Tech Blog

How Does Bruce Schneier Protect His Laptop Data? With His Fists — and PGP

"Bruce Schneier's passphrase is used to etch diamonds."

Computer security is hard. Software, computer and network security are all ongoing battles between attacker and defender. And in many cases the attacker has an inherent advantage: He only has to find one network flaw, while the defender has to find and fix every flaw.

Cryptography is an exception. As long as you don't write your own algorithm, secure encryption is easy. And the defender has an inherent mathematical advantage: Longer keys increase the amount of work the defender has to do linearly, while geometrically increasing the amount of work the attacker has to do.

Unfortunately, cryptography can't solve most computer-security problems. The one problem cryptography can solve is the security of data when it's not in use. Encrypting files, archives -- even entire disks -- is easy.

posted by Fergie @ 11/28/2007 06:44:00 PM