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Schneier, Bruce
Bruce Schneier Talks Security. Come hear about what's new, what's hot, and what's hype in security. NSA surveillance, airports, voting machines, ID cards, cryptography - he'll talk about what's in the news and what matters. Always a lively and interesting talk. Speaker Bio: Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, called a security guru by the Economist. He is the author of 12 books including the New York Times best-seller Data and Goliath: The Hidden Values to Collect Your Data and Control Your World as well as hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers. His influential newsletter Crypto-Gram and his blog Schneier on Security are read by over 250,000 people. He has testified before Congress, is a frequent guest on television and radio, has served on several government committees, and is regularly quoted in the press. Schneier is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, a program fellow at the New America Foundations Open Technology Institute, a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and an advisory board member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. He is the CTO of Resilient Systems.
 Okay, everybody count off. Good. Thanks. Anybody? Is an empty seat next to you? Raise your hand. Looks pretty full. Anyone know if this place has a fire code or not? Don't start fires. If you start a fire, you have to share. Some seats over there. People who have their hands up have a seat next to them. So the smart money goes that way. The smart money is not in Vegas. All right. So hi there. I'm Bruce Schneier. Any questions? All right. So hi there. I'm Bruce Schneier. Are there any questions? That was actually the easiest talk I ever did. So. If there are any questions, I'm happy to take them. Yes. There are actually mics here. There's one there and one I can't see behind the camera guy there. We'll find out. Right? Yes, they work. That one works. First off, Bruce, thanks for coming out. Again, always pleasure to see you here. The question is, it's an old question and I'm wondering if maybe you have any new insight into an answer on this. With cryptography becoming more in the kind of collective consciousness, especially with people who are less technically savvy, there has been an argument for a long time trying to explain to people that encryption is not security. It's very common for people who are not technically savvy to say, oh, we're just encrypt this shit and then we're secure, which obviously is total bullshit. Do you have any insight on how to better explain to those people why that's fundamentally flawed? It's interesting. I think you're right that a lot of people think of crypto as a panacea where in fact it is just a tool and a very powerful tool for actually a bunch of reasons I'm not a second. But it doesn't automatically make security. Any day that has to be used. One of the things that the Snowden documents have really brought forward, which I think is a good thing we're talking about, is metadata. Data that has to be unencrypted and consistent to operate. So this cell phone is a great surveillance device because the metadata where this phone is has to be in the clear. Otherwise it can't ring. And I should be thinking about that. I should turn the ringer off. So there's a lot of things encryption can't do. Encryption can protect data at rest. But if you are, I'm going to make this up, target corporation, you have a database of credit card numbers that you're using, it can't be encrypted because you can't, or at least encrypted, the key has to be there. I talk about encryption as a tool not as security, just like your door lock is a really important tool but doesn't magically make your house secure. What encryption does, and I think this is a real important, is it, think about NSA surveillance, it forces the listeners to target. What we know about the NSA is that they might have a bigger budget than anyone else on the planet, but they're not made of magic. They are limited by the same laws of physics and math and economics as everybody else. And if data is unencrypted, if they can tap a trans-Lagan Internet cable, they can get everything. But if stuff is encrypted, they have to target who they're listening to. I mean, if the NSA wants into your computer, they are in, period, right, done. And if they're not, there's one of two things that's true. One, it's illegal and they're following the law. And two, you're not high enough on the priorities list. So what encryption does is it forces them to go through their priorities list. And they can hack into your computer and there's no problem. But they can't hack into everybody's computer. So encryption is just a tool, but it's actually a really powerful tool because it denies a lot of the bulk access and forces the listeners to do targeted access. And there's a lot of security benefit in that. All right. Are you first in line? Yes, I believe I am. Okay. So I sort of see where that mic is. I wanted to see your opinion on the back door that Obama wants. Which one? You know, so... Okay, true. I'm not sure Obama personally has an opinion here. Why the bad guys are the only ones who are going to be able to... I'm not sure Obama personally has an opinion here. It's interesting. This is the same back door that the FBI has been wanting since the mid-90s. The mid-90s we called the crypto war. Now we call that the first crypto war. And so number three, I'm done. It is you guys. I only do two crypto wars per lifetime. So it's interesting. You're referring to PGP? No, in general. FBI director Comey gave a really interesting talk, really a Q&A at the Aspen security forum. Actually, I recommend listening to these talks. This is a very high level, mostly government discussions about security, cybersecurity, national security. Really interesting stuff. He was interviewed by I think, by Wolf Blitzer, who actually asked a great question saying, what do you say? This is kind of personal, but why don't you like the term lone wolf terrorist? That was kind of funny. Anyway, he was talking about the going dark problem and the need for back doors. And this is the scenario he is worried about. And he's very explicit. It is an ISIS scenario. ISIS is a new kind of adversary in the government's eyes because of the way it uses social media. Unlike Al Qaeda, which was like your normal terrorist organization, would recruit terrorists to go to Afghanistan, get trained and come back. ISIS does it with Twitter. And this freaks the government out. So this story, and they swear up and down this happens, is that ISIS is really good at social media, at Twitter and YouTube and various other websites. They get people to talk to them in the U.S., like you guys, except a little less socially adept and maybe kind of a little crazier. But they find these marginal people and they talk to them. And the FBI can monitor this and go FBI, rah, rah. But then they say, go use this secure app. And then this radicalized American does, they talk more securely and the FBI can't listen. And then, you know, dot, dot, dot, explosion. So this is the scenario that the FBI is worried about. Very explicitly. And they use this story again and again. And they say this is real, this is happening. Okay? Now, it's sort of interesting. If this is true, let's take it as red that is true. The other phrase they use, a new phrase I recommend, they talk about the time between flash to bang. Flash is when they find the guy, bang is when the explosion happens. And that time is decreasing. So the FBI has to be able to monitor. So they are pissed off that things like iMessage and other apps cannot be monitored even if they get a warrant. And this really bugs them. I have a warrant, damn it. Why can't I listen? But I can get the metadata, I can't listen. So if you think about that as a scenario and assume that it's true, it is not a scenario that any kind of mandatory back door solves. Because the problem isn't that the main security apps are encrypted. The problem is there exists one security app that is encrypted. Because the ICIS handler can say, you know, go download signal, go download Muzadine secrets, go download this random file encryption app I just uploaded on GitHub 10 minutes ago. So the problem is not what he thinks it is. The problem is general purpose computers. The problem is an international market in software. So I think the back door is a really bad idea for a whole bunch of reasons. I've written papers about this. But when I've come to realize in the past few weeks' it's not going to solve the problem the FBI claims it has. And I think we need to start talking about that. Because otherwise we're going to get some really bad policy. So the question there, you've got to like a... Good morning. So this will probably go less in the direction of for instance crypto. My question is somewhat twofold. I'm going to focus more on the first one. Do it one at a time because otherwise I think it's... Perfect. In the course of day to day interactions both with security people and with less security minded folks, I've come to the conclusion that operational security is very difficult to instill. From your experience is there an easier approach to getting the understanding of Opssec through to lay people? So I think Opssec is pretty much impossible. Even General Petraeus got screwed up with his Opssec dealing with his mistress. And if the director of the CIA can't get Opssec right we're all done. This is very... We see that in the hackers at Haxony. We see people screwing up Opssec again and again. I'm not sure there is a solution because good Opssec, I mean good Opssec is really and truly annoying. Good Opssec, mediocre Opssec means leaving your cell phone at home and who's going to do that? It means not using email or for certain things. I've come to the belief that we're not going to be able to train people in good Opssec. That the best security is going to be pretty good security that's ubiquitous. We saw some of this in some more of the Snowden documents. A lot of people read the real recent article that came out of Germany on X-Key Score. Really good article, actually okay article, really great document dump on documents on how X-Key Score works. This is one of the NSA's very flexible databases for monitoring the internet. You can read their documents and they talk about how they can find people using encryption and roll up the networks. They can't read the traffic, they know who's talking to who. Remember metadata encryption doesn't solve everything? I'm reading this and it's clear you can do this with PGP as well. You want to find out who's using encryption, it's easy if you monitor enough of the internet. What that tells me is that someone would be better off not using the great encryption program they wrote or the really powerful one they just downloaded but the average one that everyone else is using. That you actually are better off using an iPhone with iMessage even though I'm pretty sure the FBI can get at it individually but you can hide using it because we're all using it. You don't stand out. So I think there is a lot of power in that. You had a second part, make it quick. You actually basically answered it. Excellent. It was for pros making the use of Opssec less obvious. Right, I think it made Opssec invisible. Good security works, think of SSL, good security works if people don't even know it's there. The encryption from the handset to the base station, great if it was better but it's working because nobody knows it's there. So in thinking maybe not as thoroughly or deeply as I should about like cyber terrorist threats and bad actors that want to do corporations or infrastructure harm, these sorts of things or just the public, right? It seems like all the ingredients are there for people to do really bad things and there are a lot of holes in security flaws. What keeps there from being enough motivated bad actors and people, what keeps them at bay? I think fundamentally people are good. Society works because most of us are honest. Kind of looking at me funny but none of you have jumped up and attacked the person sitting next to you. Right, you laugh but if this was a room full of chimpanzees that would have happened. We are the only species that can get away with this. A room full of what a lot of strangers sitting quietly listening to me. So, I mean this sounds weird but I think a lot of what keeps the really bad things happening is most people don't want to do really bad things. That wasn't true, society wouldn't work. So I think you're right that all the pieces, a lot of the pieces are there, there's a couple of things. Terrorism is harder than you think. I mean yes, technically it can be easy but the whole operation is actually harder which is why you don't see a lot of terrorist attacks and what you do see tend to be these lone wolves that wake up one morning and say I'm going to do something bad which there's no conspiracy to detect. There are no mistakes you can make over the course of the planning. That flash to bang time is so short. So I really do think that's why. Something that's interesting, I want to mention as long as we're on close topic, that it's a new tactic we're seeing more of and we've seen it for a few years. Now we're seeing it I think a lot, we're going to see a lot more of it. This notion of institutional doxing, you can go into a company, take all of their stuff and publish it. It's freaking people out. This is having a Sony, this is what happened to hacking team, the guy who did that is in this room thank you very much. It's what might have happened to Ashley Madison which is a little more awkward for some people. If you remember a few years ago it was H.B. Gary federal. I think this is a really interesting tactic because it empowers individuals against very powerful organizations. And it is the first, I think the first real counter argument I've heard to the increasing practice of hiring a sociopathic CEO. That indeed if you are worried about everything your CEO says becoming public in three to five years, you might want to hire a jerk. But I expect to see more of this. I know people are noticing that WikiLeaks is publishing Saudi diplomatic cables. Man are they a corrupt country. But this is again, someone hacked in and is just dumping all this stuff. So that's an interesting example of a new bad thing that's being enabled by technology that's happening more and more of. But in general I do worry about the bad things happening but I think it's less common than we think because most people don't do them. It's the systemic stuff that bothers me. You know that the internet of things and being able to hack cars and planes and heart monitors and other stuff. And the interconnection of those. I think we're going to see more unanticipated vulnerabilities because remember complexity is the worst enemy of security. And it's not just any complexity, it is nonlinear tightly coupled complexity. And that's really what the net gives us. So we've got to be real careful there. Yes? I got to turn out a reading practical cryptography years ago. I had occasion to go back and look at it recently in the hash section. I noticed at that time you guys had assessed that our ability to analyze hash functions was good 10 to 20 years behind our ability to analyze the other primitives. And so I was wondering if you think that gap has closed in the last decade. I think we're much better at understanding hash functions now. We're not, you know, we're still implementing bad ones but that's more legacy. But I do think we are. But it's a very hard, you know, mathematically it is hard because your assumptions are squirrely and I'm not going to bore everybody with it. I think I revised that in the revised edition of that book which is cryptography engineering. But I do think we understand encryption of primitives better than hash function primitives. Even though there's an interesting assembly, you can make one from the other. Which is why enough people remember when there was the hash function contest that NIST ran five years ago, I built a hash function on top of a symmetric algorithm because I felt I understood that better than doing a hash function natively like SHA was. I'm not even convinced the NSA understood hash functions very well. You know, the SHA, they had a vulnerability, they fixed in SHA 1 which still was a little dicey and it's been updated. So because hash functions are something they're using in military applications much until recently. So they didn't have their rich history like they had with encryption. Thanks. The code in Reindale is not the code that's in AES. And I use two fish because I trust you more than I trust the feds. Do you think that AES is actually a trustworthy cypher? I think AES is. I trust AES. You know, it is Ringdall. There were a bunch of tweaks in the parameters but they're totally above board and Kosher and everyone's happy with them. Reindal, it is weird because you can actually describe the algorithm in an equation that fits on one page. It's kind of small type but it fits on one page which kind of freaks people out a little bit. But I do trust it. I think it is secure. I do not think there is a back door or anything snuck in. I truly don't. NIST did a great job with the AES process. With their SHA 3 process as well. I really do. NIST unfortunately got tarred with the Dually CU NM generator and they're trying to rebuild their trust but they've done a fantastic job with crypto primitives by and large. So I like AES. Thanks for using two fish. I like it too. Kind of wish you won because that would have been cool. But no, I use AES without reservation and don't worry about it. As disturbing as the current crypto war is something that actually scares me a lot are stories like Lava Bid or even the larger tech companies getting national security letters. I'm wondering what we can do as tech companies or just the InfoSat community in general to defend against governments secretly ordering companies to put back doors into their products. So this is actually, I think the thing that should freak us out the most. And to me this is the biggest deal revelation of Snowden and all the stories around it and Lava Bid especially. It's not that we believe that encryption was perfect and nobody can break it but we did believe that the tech rose and fell on its own merits. And the idea that the government can go into a company and say you have to break your encryption and then lie to your customers about it is terrifying. The law can subvert technology. And we cannot as a community, as a society truly believe anything is secure as long as that's true. I just talked about iMessage so we don't know and I blogged about this a couple of days ago. It didn't get enough play. It was kind of the last paragraph of a post. We don't read that far. That there is a persistent rumor going on around right now that Apple is in the FISA court fighting an order to back door iMessage and FaceTime. And Nicholas Weaver, I don't know if he's here this week, has written about how they could do that. I mean how they can modify their protocols to make that happen. And we don't know. That is fundamentally terrifying. And I don't know how to fix that. We have to fix that through the legal. There's no tech fix. I mean the kind of things you can do. I mean I think that if we thought about it we could rewrite the Apple protocols such that if they did have to put a back door in we would notice. If they did have to make a change we would notice that a change was made. We would say why did you make a change? They would say bullshit answer. We would know something was up. So maybe there's something in making your algorithms not back door proof but back door evidence. So maybe to think more about that. But this is a hard one. And I don't have a good answer. And it is one that I think really should disturb us. More open source is going to be good here. Because more sunlight harder to subvert. But as long as the government can issue secret orders and secret courts based on secret laws we have a problem. And it is not a tech problem. It's a legal problem. I think I'm going to go to that side now. Hi. We seem to be in a situation where the software industry can release software that runs on billions of devices and it's completely insecure and badly written. And there's no consequence whatsoever to those companies for the problems that they create. I mean just recently what comes to mind is the MMS hack on Android. Can you just discuss generally what you think about this from a legal perspective and software companies being held liable or accountable for the bad software that they run? So I've always been a fan of liabilities. I mean I've written the first thing about it maybe in like 02 or something. Actually even before Y2K. And so here's the basic argument. That right now as you say there are no costs to writing bad software. When you read a software license it says pretty much explicitly if this software maims your children and if we knew that it would do that then so I did not have to tell you because it would hurt sales. We're not liable. Those stringwrapped licensees issue all of that. Even security software says no, read the license it will say no claims about security are made. Even though there are. So what liability changes that? It adds a cost to not designing software properly. It adds a cost to insecurity. It adds a cost to non-reliability. And that has real value. If you think about we were already paying these costs. We're paying it in losses. We're paying it after market security devices. We're paying it in sort of the entire industry that is strung up around dealing with the fact that the software sucks. But with a liability regime we would pay anyway. The cost would be passed on to us of course. But at least we would be getting more secure software out of it. So I see a collective action problem. I see the market failure here. The market is not rewarding good security. The cost of insecurity is too low. The value of insecurity is high. And liability changes that. It is a lever we can use to rebalance these cost benefit ratio. And I think it's a powerful one. It is not a panacea. Lots of ways liabilities go wrong. But liabilities do a lot. They really provide value. And I think they would 100% here in software. So I want to see liabilities. We know why the Android vulnerability isn't being promulgated. Because they design their system so that Google produce the patch. It won't go down to the phones. Because phone manufacturers don't care very much. They don't have that tight connection between phone and iOS like you have in the iOS world. So the patch doesn't go downstream. If suddenly the phone manufacturers will libel, I assure you the patch mechanism would work better. And that's a lever we have as society and we should use it. I think it's a better one than regulation here. Because it's one that's dynamic and tends to seek its own level. But that's why you use it. And I'm a big fan of it. Actually thinking about this, hang on. Everybody smile. There's more of you than fits on the screen. It's not going to work. Hang on. People at the edge of you don't have to smile. All right, thanks. Who is next? It was you. Bruce, it seems like less and less surveys seem to show that Americans are concerned about privacy of their information. Often you hear terms like I'm not hiding anything. I don't have anything to hide. So I'm not worried. And it seems like people my age and younger don't have much of an understanding of Edward Snowden or the relevance of what he released. What would you say to those perspectives? So I don't know if people know. I had a book published in March called Data and Goliath. And it talks about surveillance, government and corporate. And I spend a lot of time, I just spent a whole chapter on that question, on privacy, and why it's important. And it's not true that people don't care about privacy. It's not true that young people don't. All surveys show that they do. They're very concerned about it. And you know this is true. You remember being a teenager. You're concerned about privacy a lot. From your parents, from your teachers, from your friends. You don't care about the government because who cares. But you're concerned about the privacy in your world. And you know, people who are fluent, kids, teenagers who are fluent in the net, are very fluent in how to maintain their privacy, they might not do a good job. But they try a lot. I argue that privacy is fundamental to human dignity, to individuality, to who we are. That without privacy we become conformist. We don't speak out. And I think that's a really interesting argument in social change. So we're in an extraordinary year where gay marriage is legal in all 50 states. And that issue went from impossible to inevitable with no intervening military, middle ground. It's amazing. But what it means is, and you can take legalization of pot. You can take a lot of issues you can take in this way. Back then, something is illegal and, let's say immoral. It goes from illegal and immoral to some cool kids are doing it, to illegal and we're not sure. And then suddenly it becomes legal. But in order to get from here to here, you've got to be at point here where the thing is illegal and people do it anyway. Because you've got to do it and say, you know, that gay sex wasn't that bad. That was kind of okay. You know, I tried pot and the world didn't end. And it might take 40 years and a couple of generations, but then you get to the point where it's legal. Interracial marriage. I mean, any of these issues. But if you have surveillance here, if you can stop people from trying the thing and saying, you know, that's not that bad. Maybe we're wrong. You never get to the point where the majority of us believe we're wrong. So I think surveillance, broad government surveillance will really have a stifling influence on social progress. Because it won't let experiments to happen. Now, it's not arguing you can make to anybody, right? But I think it is probably the most important one. But really, in anyone who says I have nothing to hide, you know they're lying, right? I mean, there aren't cameras in Scott McNeely's house because he has nothing to hide. You know, so I think you really have to point out that those arguments aren't true and that privacy isn't about something to hide. It is about maintaining your sense of self in a public world. I get to determine what I tell you people and what I don't tell you people. And that is empowering. And if I lose that, I am fundamentally a prisoner of society. So attaching privacy to something to hide, to secrets, is just wrong. It's about human dignity and it's about liberty. And I do, I spend a whole chapter on that and I do it better in the chapter. So I offer that up. Yes. Most people seem to be more worried about back doors and forced government back doors. But I'm sort of more worried about a sneakers, no more secrets, Marty type of deal where what is your opinion on quantum computing and current encryption and also quantum encryption and it's rebuttal to quantum computing? All right. So quantum encryption has nothing to do with quantum computing. They're completely separate. Let's do quantum computing first. Quantum computing is, I mean, it's going to become real, probably not in our lifetime, but it will become real. It's a technology, it's advancing. I think we can factor like 24 now. But it will get better. It has potential to change crypto but not, it will not destroy it. It will break all of the common public key cryptography algorithms. The ones based on factoring discrete log problems. So RSA, Diffie-Hellman and those. It will break those in linear time and be very nasty. But we do have public key algorithms that do work. Even the original Mirkle knapsack, the first public key algorithm, not the knapsack, his early one that had to do that, that additional work factor of a square instead of exponential. That still works. There are coding theory algorithms that still work. They're less efficient but they still work. We'll still have public key cryptography, symmetric cryptography. In theory, the best quantum cryptography does is have your key length. It reduces your brute force search by a factor of a square root. So double your key length and you're done. And this is actually hosting conferences on post-quantum cryptography. Go download the papers. People are thinking about this. How can we build secure systems that are resilient to a quantum cryptography, sorry, quantum computing theoretical world? So that's the breaking. That's quantum computing. Quantum crypto is really quantum key exchange. It vented in the 80s. Research continues. I think there's a product now. And it is a clever way to exchange keys using quantum properties. Really neat, great science, great physics. I think it is pointless from a practical point of view. Great science. I love reading the papers but I would never buy such a device because I would use one of the math systems and they work just fine. So that's sort of my quick quantum primer. But it's great science and I love the research. And eventually, yes, we'll be able to factor numbers very quickly, which will be cool. Yes? Sorry if you caught the previous talk by Yee-Jang and Demon saw and to get your opinion on sort of this idea of simplifying some of the complexity associated with encryption for personal use. So I definitely want to think civilized. This is the answer about the Opssec, the same thing. The more you make it invisible, the more you make it transparent, easy to use, no work. Even sacrificing some security, I think we do better. I'm really liking Maximum Rolandspeich signal right now on my iPhone. It's a great program. And it's just has a really clean interface. It works. I can actually, all the key exchange happens in the background. It's well designed. I can actually confirm there's no man in the middle. I don't have to but I can. The fact that I can is enough of a deterrent for people trying it. So I really like simple stuff. Simple stuff that's easy to use. Because I want everyone to use it. There's value in it being ubiquitous. So expert only encryption has much less effectiveness. If you have one last comment to the quantum guy, one of the things we know about the NSA documents is they have a budget line for quantum crypto. It's not very large. Right? Which means they do research but they don't have the quantum computer in Utah. I'm pretty sure that it's not something they can do. Yes? First of all, Bruce, you're my security crush. Mind if I take a picture with you after the show? I don't. But you guys all have weird pie plates on your chest. I'm just saying. You look like some embarrassing cult. It's flavor flab look. Bruce, so with the explosion of software defined networking and enterprises looking to use it and employ it quickly, do you have specific concerns around the security of such bleeding edge technology and this virtualization of router switches, firewall, et cetera? You have some thoughts on that? I don't have any specific concerns. Just the general of more complexity, more things to be insecure. And another layer of organization means someone else to serve a warrant to. So those are my concerns. I mean, there's huge value in this. And I'm a big fan of security outsourcing for organizations. Because it's very hard to do right. And the more you can consolidate the expertise, I think the better you'll do. So I tend to like those. But there are legal risks. That, you know, someone else can. We've been seeing some court cases that the FBI can serve a warrant on Facebook for your stuff by passing you. That they can do that. And that does cause problems. But in general, I think the value of outsourcing, the value of software defined this and that are great. And there are security risks. But I think in benefit, I tend to like that technology. So there's a balance. No major concerns over shared control planes. Yeah. I mean, that's it. I mean, you got it all. Those are the things to be concerned about. But are they major concerns? They're like regular size concerns. All right. Thanks. Yes. First of all, thank you, Bruce, for everything you do. With the pie plate also, I'm saying. My question is, even if they wanted to, would policymakers be able to stay current with the pace of technology? It's interesting. I think we're, I've come to the belief that the United States, probably other countries, are fundamentally ungovernable. And that's one of the reasons. That technology is moving so fast that the people who understand it can run rings around policymakers. And whether it's writing laws that, you know, five years in retrospect, they realized, whoa, they understood that and put that sentence in and we didn't realize that. This is hard. I like seeing laws that are technologically invariant. And instead of writing laws to keep up with technology, write laws that don't have to. And there are examples. I mean, you know, laws about assault and murder don't really care about the weapon. I could write a law about privacy for communications that doesn't care if it's email or voice or voice over IP or something. I can do that. I think that's better. I'm not sure it'll happen. I mean, there's so much co-option of the legal and policy process by people who say they make and lose a lot of money. I mean, right now, the cybersecurity bill, you know, that's probably going to get signed, has got all sorts of amendments and writers and what it actually does and what they say it does. And that's an easy one. You start doing something like healthcare or climate change. Forget it. So I'm not optimistic about lawmakers staying current because of technology. I think we're going to have to go through some bad times if we realize how to create law in a society where tech moves so fast. There's an argument to be made that the modern constitutional democracy is the best form of government mid-18th century technology could invent. Traveling communications are hard. We've got to pick one of us to go all the way over there and make laws in our name. It made sense in 1782. It's kind of what? Now. And there's a lot of ways that our systems that were designed when nation states started becoming a thing are sort of breaking now because things are different. Things are moving too fast. The communication is different. It's all different. And I think we have to redesign democracy. This, of course, is a ridiculous thing that never happened. But I think we kind of need to. That wasn't an optimistic answer, was it? So sorry. Yes? Hey, Bruce. A few months ago there was news about Chris Roberts being detained at the airport after he posted a tweet about the security of the United States. Does anyone know if he's here? Okay. Yes? And then your blog post said that maybe FBI knew that Chris Roberts works in the field of avionics. That's why he was detained. And then recently Wall Street went down and there was this news that the anonymous had posted a warning about it. Even though Wall Street claims that it was an IT issue, it was a minor IT issue. So what do you think? Is the emphasis on offensive security? Right. Like the issue was similar with Chris Roberts. So we didn't know in the Chris Roberts case that he actually was being at least somewhat watched by the FBI. That he talked to them before. And the Chris Roberts case is actually very complicated. And I stopped commenting when I realized it was way more complicated than I understood. You know, this, I don't know if people don't know this is the case of him being on a plane and saying something about going into the avionics bus via the USB port in his seat. Which, you know, would be crazy if you could, but it wouldn't surprise me if Airbus forgot about that. It really seems every time you put physical security people and give them an IT security problem, they completely forget that they should talk to an IT security person. Anyone follow the hack on the Brinks safe? It's like completely embarrassing. It's like they never even open an IT security book. Oh yeah, we can do this. No problem. I don't know how much proactively, it does seem like the FBI is monitoring more groups and more individuals. You know, we see them, you know, monitoring the Occupy movement or Black Lives Matter. Real social change movements that might not be as, I don't know, as mainstream as they could be. So there's a lot of that going on. How much, in those cases I don't know, the Wolk Street case I have no idea. And certainly there's always a lot of bragging that might not be true. But then they posted it the day before the Wolk Street went down. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know the details. And it's hard to speculate. I think there is more monitoring than we all think. I mean, this is the point of fusion centers, this is the point of information sharing between the NSA and others, and I think a lot of it's going on. Yes. So do you trust elliptic curve based cypress sweets or non-elliptic curve and why? So I've been skeptical on elliptic curves for a bunch of years. I'm in the minority here. Most cryptographers do trust them. So I'm giving you a minority view. My feeling is that there's a lot we don't know about elliptic curve mathematics. And there certainly could be classes of elliptic curves that have hidden trap doors that we don't know. The NSA uses elliptic curve crypto. So I can tell you that. So in general or at least in some instances it is secure, believed by the NSA. But I also know that they have in some cases tried to influence curve selection. Now for good or for bad I can't tell you. So I worry about elliptic curves where the curve selection process isn't transparent. Now if you want to use elliptic curves in your system Dan Bernstein, right a guy we all trust, or at least I do, had a public process and they called the Bernstein curves and they are available and I would use those without reservation. The NSA said here, here's some great curves I would say, you know, huh? So that's my feeling on that. I think the math is sound but I think there are gotchas we don't fully understand. All right, I'm getting the go or get off stage soon signal. So I'm going to take one. Do you have a yes or no question? No. All right, short answer. Go. Okay. So you got me into security. I've been in this industry 10 years. Thank you so much. So my question is now that I find myself in position, you know, hypothetically where I'm working with government agency where they use the same software as everyone else. That's right. They got the same problems as everyone else and I'm convinced that the actions of stockpiling zero days, weakening crypto, you know, all that stuff is just harmful. What can I do to convince or show these people that actually these other arms that the government are doing things that hurt us. This is hard and a lot of us are trying to do this. I mean, really just keep saying it. This is the political process. It's not the tech process. It's not clean. All right, I have to leave. I'm doing a book signing at the bookstore at four. So come by and say hi. Not all of you at once. I will be around. I'm going to go outside there right now assuming there is like space to breathe. Happy to sign books and say hi. Thank you very much for coming. Thanks for sitting. Have a good weekend.
 Okay, everybody count off. Good. Thanks. Anybody? Is an  empty seat next to you? Raise your hand. Looks pretty full.  Anyone know if this place has a fire code or not? Don't start fires.  If you start a fire, you have to share. Some seats over there.  People who have their hands up have a seat next to them. So the smart money goes that  way. The smart money is not in Vegas. All right. So hi there. I'm  Bruce Schneier. Any questions? All right. So hi there. I'm Bruce Schneier. Are there  any questions? That was actually the easiest talk I ever did. So.  If there are any questions, I'm happy to take them. Yes. There are actually mics here.  There's one there and one I can't see behind the camera guy there. We'll find out. Right?  Yes, they work. That one works. First off, Bruce, thanks for coming out. Again, always  pleasure to see you here. The question is, it's an old question and I'm wondering if  maybe you have any new insight into an answer on this. With cryptography becoming more in  the kind of collective consciousness, especially with people who are less technically savvy,  there has been an argument for a long time trying to explain to people that encryption  is not security. It's very common for people who are not technically savvy to say, oh,  we're just encrypt this shit and then we're secure, which obviously is total bullshit.  Do you have any insight on how to better explain to those people why that's fundamentally  flawed? It's interesting. I think you're right that a lot of people think of crypto as a  panacea where in fact it is just a tool and a very powerful tool for actually a bunch of  reasons I'm not a second. But it doesn't automatically make security. Any day that has to be used.  One of the things that the Snowden documents have really brought forward, which I think  is a good thing we're talking about, is metadata. Data that has to be unencrypted and  consistent to operate. So this cell phone is a great surveillance device because the  metadata where this phone is has to be in the clear. Otherwise it can't ring. And I  should be thinking about that. I should turn the ringer off. So there's a lot of things  encryption can't do. Encryption can protect data at rest. But if you are, I'm going to  make this up, target corporation, you have a database of credit card numbers that you're  using, it can't be encrypted because you can't, or at least encrypted, the key has to be there.  I talk about encryption as a tool not as security, just like your door lock is a really important  tool but doesn't magically make your house secure. What encryption does, and I think this is a  real important, is it, think about NSA surveillance, it forces the listeners to target. What we  know about the NSA is that they might have a bigger budget than anyone else on the planet,  but they're not made of magic. They are limited by the same laws of physics and math and  economics as everybody else. And if data is unencrypted, if they can tap a trans-Lagan  Internet cable, they can get everything. But if stuff is encrypted, they have to target  who they're listening to. I mean, if the NSA wants into your computer, they are in, period,  right, done. And if they're not, there's one of two things that's true. One, it's illegal  and they're following the law. And two, you're not high enough on the priorities list. So  what encryption does is it forces them to go through their priorities list. And they  can hack into your computer and there's no problem. But they can't hack into everybody's  computer. So encryption is just a tool, but it's actually a really powerful tool because  it denies a lot of the bulk access and forces the listeners to do targeted access. And there's  a lot of security benefit in that. All right. Are you first in line?  Yes, I believe I am. Okay. So I sort of see where that mic is. I wanted to see your opinion  on the back door that Obama wants. Which one? You know, so...  Okay, true. I'm not sure Obama personally has an opinion here.  Why the bad guys are the only ones who are going to be able to...  I'm not sure Obama personally has an opinion here. It's interesting. This is the same back  door that the FBI has been wanting since the mid-90s. The mid-90s we called the crypto  war. Now we call that the first crypto war. And so number three, I'm done. It is you guys.  I only do two crypto wars per lifetime. So it's interesting.  You're referring to PGP? No, in general. FBI director Comey gave a really interesting  talk, really a Q&A at the Aspen security forum. Actually, I recommend listening to these talks.  This is a very high level, mostly government discussions about security, cybersecurity,  national security. Really interesting stuff. He was interviewed by I think, by Wolf Blitzer,  who actually asked a great question saying, what do you say? This is kind of personal,  but why don't you like the term lone wolf terrorist? That was kind of funny. Anyway,  he was talking about the going dark problem and the need for back doors. And this is the  scenario he is worried about. And he's very explicit. It is an ISIS scenario. ISIS is  a new kind of adversary in the government's eyes because of the way it uses social media.  Unlike Al Qaeda, which was like your normal terrorist organization, would recruit terrorists  to go to Afghanistan, get trained and come back. ISIS does it with Twitter. And this  freaks the government out. So this story, and they swear up and down this happens, is  that ISIS is really good at social media, at Twitter and YouTube and various other websites.  They get people to talk to them in the U.S., like you guys, except a little less socially  adept and maybe kind of a little crazier. But they find these marginal people and they  talk to them. And the FBI can monitor this and go FBI, rah, rah. But then they say, go  use this secure app. And then this radicalized American does, they talk more securely and  the FBI can't listen. And then, you know, dot, dot, dot, explosion. So this is the  scenario that the FBI is worried about. Very explicitly. And they use this story again and  again. And they say this is real, this is happening. Okay? Now, it's sort of interesting. If this  is true, let's take it as red that is true. The other phrase they use, a new phrase I  recommend, they talk about the time between flash to bang. Flash is when they find the  guy, bang is when the explosion happens. And that time is decreasing. So the FBI has to  be able to monitor. So they are pissed off that things like iMessage and other apps cannot  be monitored even if they get a warrant. And this really bugs them. I have a warrant,  damn it. Why can't I listen? But I can get the metadata, I can't listen. So if you think  about that as a scenario and assume that it's true, it is not a scenario that any kind  of mandatory back door solves. Because the problem isn't that the main security apps  are encrypted. The problem is there exists one security app that is encrypted. Because  the ICIS handler can say, you know, go download signal, go download Muzadine secrets, go download  this random file encryption app I just uploaded on GitHub 10 minutes ago. So the problem is  not what he thinks it is. The problem is general purpose computers. The problem is an international  market in software. So I think the back door is a really bad idea for a whole bunch of  reasons. I've written papers about this. But when I've come to realize in the past few  weeks' it's not going to solve the problem the FBI claims it has. And I think we need  to start talking about that. Because otherwise we're going to get some really bad policy.  So the question there, you've got to like a...  Good morning. So this will probably go less in the direction of for instance crypto. My  question is somewhat twofold. I'm going to focus more on the first one.  Do it one at a time because otherwise I think it's...  Perfect. In the course of day to day interactions both with security people and with less security  minded folks, I've come to the conclusion that operational security is very difficult  to instill. From your experience is there an easier approach to getting the understanding  of Opssec through to lay people?  So I think Opssec is pretty much impossible. Even General Petraeus got screwed up with  his Opssec dealing with his mistress. And if the director of the CIA can't get Opssec  right we're all done. This is very... We see that in the hackers at Haxony. We see people  screwing up Opssec again and again. I'm not sure there is a solution because good Opssec,  I mean good Opssec is really and truly annoying.  Good Opssec, mediocre Opssec means leaving your cell phone at home and who's going to  do that? It means not using email or for certain things. I've come to the belief that we're  not going to be able to train people in good Opssec. That the best security is going to  be pretty good security that's ubiquitous. We saw some of this in some more of the Snowden  documents. A lot of people read the real recent article that came out of Germany on X-Key  Score. Really good article, actually okay article, really great document dump on documents  on how X-Key Score works. This is one of the NSA's very flexible databases for monitoring  the internet. You can read their documents and they talk about how they can find people  using encryption and roll up the networks. They can't read the traffic, they know who's  talking to who. Remember metadata encryption doesn't solve everything? I'm reading this  and it's clear you can do this with PGP as well. You want to find out who's using encryption,  it's easy if you monitor enough of the internet. What that tells me is that someone would be  better off not using the great encryption program they wrote or the really powerful  one they just downloaded but the average one that everyone else is using. That you actually  are better off using an iPhone with iMessage even though I'm pretty sure the FBI can get  at it individually but you can hide using it because we're all using it. You don't stand  out. So I think there is a lot of power in that. You had a second part, make it quick.  You actually basically answered it. Excellent. It was for pros making the use of Opssec less  obvious. Right, I think it made Opssec invisible. Good security works, think of SSL, good security  works if people don't even know it's there. The encryption from the handset to the base  station, great if it was better but it's working because nobody knows it's there.  So in thinking maybe not as thoroughly or deeply as I should about like cyber terrorist  threats and bad actors that want to do corporations or infrastructure harm, these sorts of things  or just the public, right? It seems like all the ingredients are there for people to do  really bad things and there are a lot of holes in security flaws. What keeps there from being  enough motivated bad actors and people, what keeps them at bay?  I think fundamentally people are good. Society works because most of us are honest. Kind of  looking at me funny but none of you have jumped up and attacked the person sitting next to you.  Right, you laugh but if this was a room full of chimpanzees that would have happened. We  are the only species that can get away with this. A room full of what a lot of strangers  sitting quietly listening to me. So, I mean this sounds weird but I think a lot of what  keeps the really bad things happening is most people don't want to do really bad things.  That wasn't true, society wouldn't work. So I think you're right that all the pieces,  a lot of the pieces are there, there's a couple of things. Terrorism is harder than you think.  I mean yes, technically it can be easy but the whole operation is actually harder which  is why you don't see a lot of terrorist attacks and what you do see tend to be these lone  wolves that wake up one morning and say I'm going to do something bad which there's no  conspiracy to detect. There are no mistakes you can make over the course of the planning.  That flash to bang time is so short. So I really do think that's why. Something that's  interesting, I want to mention as long as we're on close topic, that it's a new tactic we're  seeing more of and we've seen it for a few years. Now we're seeing it I think a lot,  we're going to see a lot more of it. This notion of institutional doxing, you can go  into a company, take all of their stuff and publish it. It's freaking people out. This  is having a Sony, this is what happened to hacking team, the guy who did that is in this  room thank you very much.  It's what might have happened to Ashley Madison which is a little more awkward for some people.  If you remember a few years ago it was H.B. Gary federal. I think this is a really interesting  tactic because it empowers individuals against very powerful organizations. And it is the  first, I think the first real counter argument I've heard to the increasing practice of hiring  a sociopathic CEO. That indeed if you are worried about everything your CEO says becoming  public in three to five years, you might want to hire a jerk. But I expect to see more of  this. I know people are noticing that WikiLeaks is publishing Saudi diplomatic cables. Man  are they a corrupt country. But this is again, someone hacked in and is just dumping all  this stuff.  So that's an interesting example of a new bad thing that's being enabled by technology  that's happening more and more of. But in general I do worry about the bad things happening  but I think it's less common than we think because most people don't do them. It's the  systemic stuff that bothers me. You know that the internet of things and being able to hack  cars and planes and heart monitors and other stuff. And the interconnection of those. I  think we're going to see more unanticipated vulnerabilities because remember complexity  is the worst enemy of security. And it's not just any complexity, it is nonlinear tightly  coupled complexity. And that's really what the net gives us. So we've got to be real  careful there. Yes?  I got to turn out a reading practical cryptography years ago. I had occasion to go back and look  at it recently in the hash section. I noticed at that time you guys had assessed that our  ability to analyze hash functions was good 10 to 20 years behind our ability to analyze  the other primitives. And so I was wondering if you think that gap has closed in the last  decade.  I think we're much better at understanding hash functions now. We're not, you know, we're  still implementing bad ones but that's more legacy. But I do think we are. But it's a very  hard, you know, mathematically it is hard because your assumptions are squirrely and  I'm not going to bore everybody with it. I think I revised that in the revised edition  of that book which is cryptography engineering. But I do think we understand encryption of  primitives better than hash function primitives. Even though there's an interesting assembly,  you can make one from the other. Which is why enough people remember when there was the  hash function contest that NIST ran five years ago, I built a hash function on top of a symmetric  algorithm because I felt I understood that better than doing a hash function natively  like SHA was. I'm not even convinced the NSA understood hash functions very well. You  know, the SHA, they had a vulnerability, they fixed in SHA 1 which still was a little dicey  and it's been updated. So because hash functions are something they're using in military applications  much until recently. So they didn't have their rich history like they had with encryption.  Thanks.  The code in Reindale is not the code that's in AES. And I use two fish because I trust  you more than I trust the feds. Do you think that AES is actually a trustworthy cypher?  I think AES is. I trust AES. You know, it is Ringdall. There were a bunch of tweaks  in the parameters but they're totally above board and Kosher and everyone's happy with  them. Reindal, it is weird because you can actually describe the algorithm in an equation  that fits on one page. It's kind of small type but it fits on one page which kind of  freaks people out a little bit. But I do trust it. I think it is secure. I do not think there  is a back door or anything snuck in. I truly don't. NIST did a great job with the AES process.  With their SHA 3 process as well. I really do. NIST unfortunately got tarred with the  Dually CU NM generator and they're trying to rebuild their trust but they've done a fantastic  job with crypto primitives by and large. So I like AES. Thanks for using two fish. I like  it too. Kind of wish you won because that would have been cool. But no, I use AES without  reservation and don't worry about it. As disturbing as the current crypto war is something that  actually scares me a lot are stories like Lava Bid or even the larger tech companies getting  national security letters. I'm wondering what we can do as tech companies or just the InfoSat  community in general to defend against governments secretly ordering companies to put back doors  into their products. So this is actually, I think the thing that should freak us out  the most. And to me this is the biggest deal revelation of Snowden and all the stories  around it and Lava Bid especially. It's not that we believe that encryption was perfect  and nobody can break it but we did believe that the tech rose and fell on its own merits.  And the idea that the government can go into a company and say you have to break your encryption  and then lie to your customers about it is terrifying. The law can subvert technology.  And we cannot as a community, as a society truly believe anything is secure as long as  that's true. I just talked about iMessage so we don't know and I blogged about this a couple  of days ago. It didn't get enough play. It was kind of the last paragraph of a post.  We don't read that far. That there is a persistent rumor going on around right now that Apple  is in the FISA court fighting an order to back door iMessage and FaceTime. And Nicholas  Weaver, I don't know if he's here this week, has written about how they could do that.  I mean how they can modify their protocols to make that happen. And we don't know. That  is fundamentally terrifying. And I don't know how to fix that. We have to fix that through  the legal. There's no tech fix. I mean the kind of things you can do. I mean I think  that if we thought about it we could rewrite the Apple protocols such that if they did  have to put a back door in we would notice. If they did have to make a change we would  notice that a change was made. We would say why did you make a change? They would say  bullshit answer. We would know something was up. So maybe there's something in making your  algorithms not back door proof but back door evidence. So maybe to think more about that.  But this is a hard one. And I don't have a good answer. And it is one that I think really  should disturb us. More open source is going to be good here. Because more sunlight harder  to subvert. But as long as the government can issue secret orders and secret courts based  on secret laws we have a problem. And it is not a tech problem. It's a legal problem.  I think I'm going to go to that side now.  Hi. We seem to be in a situation where the software industry can release software that  runs on billions of devices and it's completely insecure and badly written. And there's no  consequence whatsoever to those companies for the problems that they create. I mean just  recently what comes to mind is the MMS hack on Android. Can you just discuss generally  what you think about this from a legal perspective and software companies being held liable or  accountable for the bad software that they run? So I've always been a fan of liabilities.  I mean I've written the first thing about it maybe in like 02 or something. Actually  even before Y2K. And so here's the basic argument. That right now as you say there are no costs  to writing bad software. When you read a software license it says pretty much explicitly if  this software maims your children and if we knew that it would do that then so I did not  have to tell you because it would hurt sales. We're not liable. Those stringwrapped licensees  issue all of that. Even security software says no, read the license it will say no claims  about security are made. Even though there are. So what liability changes that? It adds  a cost to not designing software properly. It adds a cost to insecurity. It adds a cost  to non-reliability. And that has real value. If you think about we were already paying  these costs. We're paying it in losses. We're paying it after market security devices. We're  paying it in sort of the entire industry that is strung up around dealing with the fact  that the software sucks. But with a liability regime we would pay anyway. The cost would  be passed on to us of course. But at least we would be getting more secure software out  of it. So I see a collective action problem. I see the market failure here. The market  is not rewarding good security. The cost of insecurity is too low. The value of insecurity  is high. And liability changes that. It is a lever we can use to rebalance these cost  benefit ratio. And I think it's a powerful one. It is not a panacea. Lots of ways liabilities  go wrong. But liabilities do a lot. They really provide value. And I think they would 100%  here in software. So I want to see liabilities. We know why the Android vulnerability isn't  being promulgated. Because they design their system so that Google produce the patch. It  won't go down to the phones. Because phone manufacturers don't care very much. They don't  have that tight connection between phone and iOS like you have in the iOS world. So the  patch doesn't go downstream. If suddenly the phone manufacturers will libel, I assure you  the patch mechanism would work better. And that's a lever we have as society and we should  use it. I think it's a better one than regulation here. Because it's one that's dynamic and tends  to seek its own level. But that's why you use it. And I'm a big fan of it. Actually thinking  about this, hang on. Everybody smile. There's more of you than fits on the screen. It's  not going to work. Hang on. People at the edge of you don't have to smile. All right,  thanks. Who is next? It was you. Bruce, it seems like less and less surveys seem to show  that Americans are concerned about privacy of their information. Often you hear terms  like I'm not hiding anything. I don't have anything to hide. So I'm not worried. And  it seems like people my age and younger don't have much of an understanding of Edward Snowden  or the relevance of what he released. What would you say to those perspectives?  So I don't know if people know. I had a book published in March called Data and Goliath.  And it talks about surveillance, government and corporate. And I spend a lot of time,  I just spent a whole chapter on that question, on privacy, and why it's important. And it's  not true that people don't care about privacy. It's not true that young people don't. All  surveys show that they do. They're very concerned about it. And you know this is true. You remember  being a teenager. You're concerned about privacy a lot. From your parents, from your teachers,  from your friends. You don't care about the government because who cares. But you're concerned  about the privacy in your world. And you know, people who are fluent, kids, teenagers who  are fluent in the net, are very fluent in how to maintain their privacy, they might not  do a good job. But they try a lot. I argue that privacy is fundamental to human dignity,  to individuality, to who we are. That without privacy we become conformist. We don't speak  out. And I think that's a really interesting argument in social change. So we're in an  extraordinary year where gay marriage is legal in all 50 states. And that issue went from  impossible to inevitable with no intervening military, middle ground. It's amazing. But  what it means is, and you can take legalization of pot. You can take a lot of issues you can  take in this way. Back then, something is illegal and, let's say immoral. It goes from  illegal and immoral to some cool kids are doing it, to illegal and we're not sure. And  then suddenly it becomes legal. But in order to get from here to here, you've got to be  at point here where the thing is illegal and people do it anyway. Because you've got to  do it and say, you know, that gay sex wasn't that bad. That was kind of okay. You know,  I tried pot and the world didn't end. And it might take 40 years and a couple of generations,  but then you get to the point where it's legal. Interracial marriage. I mean, any of these  issues. But if you have surveillance here, if you can stop people from trying the thing  and saying, you know, that's not that bad. Maybe we're wrong. You never get to the point  where the majority of us believe we're wrong. So I think surveillance, broad government surveillance  will really have a stifling influence on social progress. Because it won't let experiments  to happen. Now, it's not arguing you can make to anybody, right? But I think it is probably  the most important one. But really, in anyone who says I have nothing to hide, you know  they're lying, right? I mean, there aren't cameras in Scott McNeely's house because he  has nothing to hide. You know, so I think you really have to point out that those arguments  aren't true and that privacy isn't about something to hide. It is about maintaining your sense  of self in a public world. I get to determine what I tell you people and what I don't tell  you people. And that is empowering. And if I lose that, I am fundamentally a prisoner  of society. So attaching privacy to something to hide, to secrets, is just wrong. It's about  human dignity and it's about liberty. And I do, I spend a whole chapter on that and  I do it better in the chapter. So I offer that up. Yes.  Most people seem to be more worried about back doors and forced government back doors.  But I'm sort of more worried about a sneakers, no more secrets, Marty type of deal where  what is your opinion on quantum computing and current encryption and also quantum encryption  and it's rebuttal to quantum computing? All right. So quantum encryption has nothing  to do with quantum computing. They're completely separate. Let's do quantum computing first.  Quantum computing is, I mean, it's going to become real, probably not in our lifetime,  but it will become real. It's a technology, it's advancing. I think we can factor like  24 now. But it will get better. It has potential to change crypto but not, it will not destroy  it. It will break all of the common public key cryptography algorithms. The ones based  on factoring discrete log problems. So RSA, Diffie-Hellman and those. It will break those  in linear time and be very nasty. But we do have public key algorithms that do work. Even  the original Mirkle knapsack, the first public key algorithm, not the knapsack, his early  one that had to do that, that additional work factor of a square instead of exponential.  That still works. There are coding theory algorithms that still work. They're less efficient  but they still work. We'll still have public key cryptography, symmetric cryptography.  In theory, the best quantum cryptography does is have your key length. It reduces your brute  force search by a factor of a square root. So double your key length and you're done.  And this is actually hosting conferences on post-quantum cryptography. Go download the  papers. People are thinking about this. How can we build secure systems that are resilient  to a quantum cryptography, sorry, quantum computing theoretical world? So that's the  breaking. That's quantum computing. Quantum crypto is really quantum key exchange. It  vented in the 80s. Research continues. I think there's a product now. And it is a clever  way to exchange keys using quantum properties. Really neat, great science, great physics.  I think it is pointless from a practical point of view. Great science. I love reading the  papers but I would never buy such a device because I would use one of the math systems  and they work just fine. So that's sort of my quick quantum primer. But it's great science  and I love the research. And eventually, yes, we'll be able to factor numbers very quickly,  which will be cool. Yes? Sorry if you caught the previous talk by  Yee-Jang and Demon saw and to get your opinion on sort of this idea of simplifying some of  the complexity associated with encryption for personal use. So I definitely want to  think civilized. This is the answer about the Opssec, the same thing. The more you make  it invisible, the more you make it transparent, easy to use, no work. Even sacrificing some  security, I think we do better. I'm really liking Maximum Rolandspeich signal right now  on my iPhone. It's a great program. And it's just has a really clean interface. It works.  I can actually, all the key exchange happens in the background. It's well designed. I can  actually confirm there's no man in the middle. I don't have to but I can. The fact that I  can is enough of a deterrent for people trying it. So I really like simple stuff. Simple stuff  that's easy to use. Because I want everyone to use it. There's value in it being ubiquitous.  So expert only encryption has much less effectiveness. If you have one last comment to the  quantum guy, one of the things we know about the NSA documents is they have a budget line  for quantum crypto. It's not very large. Right? Which means they do research but they  don't have the quantum computer in Utah. I'm pretty sure that it's not something they can do.  Yes? First of all, Bruce, you're my security crush. Mind if I take a picture with you after  the show? I don't. But you guys all have weird pie plates on your chest. I'm just saying.  You look like some embarrassing cult. It's flavor flab look. Bruce, so with the explosion of  software defined networking and enterprises looking to use it and employ it quickly, do you have  specific concerns around the security of such bleeding edge technology and this virtualization  of router switches, firewall, et cetera? You have some thoughts on that? I don't have any  specific concerns. Just the general of more complexity, more things to be insecure. And  another layer of organization means someone else to serve a warrant to. So those are my concerns.  I mean, there's huge value in this. And I'm a big fan of security outsourcing for organizations.  Because it's very hard to do right. And the more you can consolidate the expertise, I think the  better you'll do. So I tend to like those. But there are legal risks. That, you know, someone  else can. We've been seeing some court cases that the FBI can serve a warrant on Facebook for  your stuff by passing you. That they can do that. And that does cause problems. But in general, I  think the value of outsourcing, the value of software defined this and that are great. And  there are security risks. But I think in benefit, I tend to like that technology.  So there's a balance. No major concerns over shared control planes.  Yeah. I mean, that's it. I mean, you got it all. Those are the things to be concerned about. But  are they major concerns? They're like regular size concerns.  All right. Thanks. Yes.  First of all, thank you, Bruce, for everything you do.  With the pie plate also, I'm saying.  My question is, even if they wanted to, would policymakers be able to stay current with the  pace of technology? It's interesting. I think we're, I've come to the belief that the United  States, probably other countries, are fundamentally ungovernable. And that's one of the reasons.  That technology is moving so fast that the people who understand it can run rings around  policymakers. And whether it's writing laws that, you know, five years in retrospect,  they realized, whoa, they understood that and put that sentence in and we didn't realize  that. This is hard. I like seeing laws that are technologically invariant. And instead  of writing laws to keep up with technology, write laws that don't have to. And there are  examples. I mean, you know, laws about assault and murder don't really care about the weapon.  I could write a law about privacy for communications that doesn't care if it's email or voice  or voice over IP or something. I can do that. I think that's better. I'm not sure it'll  happen. I mean, there's so much co-option of the legal and policy process by people who  say they make and lose a lot of money. I mean, right now, the cybersecurity bill, you know,  that's probably going to get signed, has got all sorts of amendments and writers and what  it actually does and what they say it does. And that's an easy one. You start doing something  like healthcare or climate change. Forget it. So I'm not optimistic about lawmakers staying  current because of technology. I think we're going to have to go through some bad times  if we realize how to create law in a society where tech moves so fast. There's an argument  to be made that the modern constitutional democracy is the best form of government mid-18th  century technology could invent. Traveling communications are hard. We've got to pick  one of us to go all the way over there and make laws in our name. It made sense in 1782.  It's kind of what? Now. And there's a lot of ways that our systems that were designed  when nation states started becoming a thing are sort of breaking now because things are  different. Things are moving too fast. The communication is different. It's all different.  And I think we have to redesign democracy. This, of course, is a ridiculous thing that  never happened. But I think we kind of need to. That wasn't an optimistic answer, was  it? So sorry. Yes?  Hey, Bruce. A few months ago there was news about Chris Roberts being detained at the  airport after he posted a tweet about the security of the United States.  Does anyone know if he's here? Okay. Yes? And then your blog post said that maybe FBI  knew that Chris Roberts works in the field of avionics. That's why he was detained. And  then recently Wall Street went down and there was this news that the anonymous had posted  a warning about it. Even though Wall Street claims that it was an IT issue, it was a minor  IT issue. So what do you think? Is the emphasis on offensive security? Right. Like the issue  was similar with Chris Roberts. So we didn't know in the Chris Roberts case that he actually  was being at least somewhat watched by the FBI. That he talked to them before. And the  Chris Roberts case is actually very complicated. And I stopped commenting when I realized it  was way more complicated than I understood. You know, this, I don't know if people don't  know this is the case of him being on a plane and saying something about going into the  avionics bus via the USB port in his seat. Which, you know, would be crazy if you could,  but it wouldn't surprise me if Airbus forgot about that. It really seems every time you  put physical security people and give them an IT security problem, they completely forget  that they should talk to an IT security person. Anyone follow the hack on the Brinks safe?  It's like completely embarrassing. It's like they never even open an IT security book.  Oh yeah, we can do this. No problem. I don't know how much proactively, it does seem like  the FBI is monitoring more groups and more individuals. You know, we see them, you know,  monitoring the Occupy movement or Black Lives Matter. Real social change movements that  might not be as, I don't know, as mainstream as they could be. So there's a lot of that  going on. How much, in those cases I don't know, the Wolk Street case I have no idea.  And certainly there's always a lot of bragging that might not be true. But then they posted  it the day before the Wolk Street went down. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know the details.  And it's hard to speculate. I think there is more monitoring than we all think. I mean,  this is the point of fusion centers, this is the point of information sharing between  the NSA and others, and I think a lot of it's going on. Yes.  So do you trust elliptic curve based cypress sweets or non-elliptic curve and why?  So I've been skeptical on elliptic curves for a bunch of years. I'm in the minority  here. Most cryptographers do trust them. So I'm giving you a minority view. My feeling  is that there's a lot we don't know about elliptic curve mathematics. And there certainly  could be classes of elliptic curves that have hidden trap doors that we don't know. The NSA  uses elliptic curve crypto. So I can tell you that. So in general or at least in some  instances it is secure, believed by the NSA. But I also know that they have in some cases  tried to influence curve selection. Now for good or for bad I can't tell you. So I worry  about elliptic curves where the curve selection process isn't transparent. Now if you want  to use elliptic curves in your system Dan Bernstein, right a guy we all trust, or at least  I do, had a public process and they called the Bernstein curves and they are available  and I would use those without reservation. The NSA said here, here's some great curves  I would say, you know, huh? So that's my feeling on that. I think the math is sound but I think  there are gotchas we don't fully understand. All right, I'm getting the go or get off stage  soon signal. So I'm going to take one. Do you have a yes or no question? No. All right,  short answer. Go. Okay. So you got me into security. I've been in this industry 10 years.  Thank you so much. So my question is now that I find myself in position, you know, hypothetically  where I'm working with government agency where they use the same software as everyone else.  That's right. They got the same problems as everyone else and I'm convinced that the  actions of stockpiling zero days, weakening crypto, you know, all that stuff is just  harmful. What can I do to convince or show these people that actually these other arms  that the government are doing things that hurt us. This is hard and a lot of us are  trying to do this. I mean, really just keep saying it. This is the political process.  It's not the tech process. It's not clean. All right, I have to leave. I'm doing a book  signing at the bookstore at four. So come by and say hi. Not all of you at once. I will  be around. I'm going to go outside there right now assuming there is like space to breathe.  Happy to sign books and say hi. Thank you very much for coming. Thanks for sitting. Have  a good weekend.
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