On 2014-04-25, at 4:09 AM, Peter Gutmann <[email protected]> wrote:
> http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/book.pdf In which Peter says: > The major lesson that we’ve learned from the history of security > (un-)usability is that technical solutions like PKI and access control don’t > align too well with user conceptual models Exactly. If, for example, a user needs to understand the distinction between “trust as an introducer” versus “trust the identity of” in order to behave securely, then the system is going to fail. Or as I’ve said in http://blog.agilebits.com/2012/07/03/check-out-my-debit-card-or-why-people-make-bad-security-choices/ > when we observe people systematically behaving insecurely, we have to ask not > "how can people be so stupid” but instead “how is the system leading them to > behave insecurely.” I hated X.509 when it was first being introduced, and much preferred PGP’s “Web of Trust”. I still hate X.509 for all of the usual reasons, but I now have much more sympathy for the design choices. It fails at its goal of not demanding unrealistic from ordinary users, but at least it tries attempts to do so. Cheers, -j _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list [email protected] http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
