Nanashi comments on A pair of free information security tools I wrote - LessWrong

17 Post author: Nanashi 11 April 2015 11:03PM

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Comment author: Nanashi 16 April 2015 06:01:20PM 2 points [-]

That made me smile. One of my favorite sayings is that "all security is security through obscurity", because all it really takes is a lead pipe and some duct tape to "de-obscure" the password. But, that said, I've always considered such "rubberhose cryptanalysis" to be a form of social engineering. Actually, that's a great doublespeak term for it. "Extreme Adversarial Social Engineering". It even has a good acronym: EASE.

When you say "the threat model which you skipped", what do you mean?

Comment author: Lumifer 16 April 2015 06:11:20PM 1 point [-]

all it really takes is a lead pipe and some duct tape to "de-obscure" the password

Which is why many contemporary secure systems do not rely on permanent passwords (e.g. OTR messaging).

threat model

The usual: who is your adversary and against which threats are you trying to protect yourself?