As part of their 20th Anniversary celebration, Dark Reading asked five cybersecurity industry leaders who wrote blogs or columns for them over the years to select their favorite piece and share their reflections on the topic today. This is my section.
Renowned technologist and author Bruce Schneier contributed a column on June 20, 2010, warning about cryptography’s inability to secure modern networks, a point he says he has been trying to argue since 2000.
“For a while now, I’ve pointed out that cryptography is singularly ill-suited to solve the major network security problems of today: denial-of-service attacks, website defacement, theft of credit card numbers, identity theft, viruses and worms, DNS attacks, network penetration, and so on.
“Recently, I talked to a former NSA employee at a conference. He told me that back in the 1990s, he had a copy of my book Applied Cryptography by his desk, as did many other cryptographers working at Ft. Meade. People were allowed to refer to it, but they were not allowed to cite it.
“The 1990s were an important decade for cryptography. This was before the internet went mass market, when cryptography was just emerging from a niche academic discipline to a mainstream engineering one. There wasn’t much that programmers could read. The NSA used my book for the same reason it became a bestseller: because it collected all the academic cryptography of the time in one place and made it understandable to people who weren’t mathematicians. They feared it for exactly the same reason.
“I’ve been thinking about that conversation as I revisit a 2010 essay I wrote for Dark Reading, ‘The Failure of Cryptography to Secure Modern Networks.’ Cryptography has inherent mathematical properties that greatly favor the defender. Adding a single bit to the length of a key adds only a slight amount of work for the defender but doubles the amount of work the attacker has to do. Doubling the key length doubles the amount of work the defender has to do (if that—I’m being approximate here) but increases the attacker’s workload exponentially. For many years, we have exploited that mathematical imbalance.
“Computer security is much more balanced. There’ll be a new attack, and a new defense, and a new attack, and a new defense. It’s an arms race between attacker and defender. And it’s a very fast arms race. New vulnerabilities are discovered all the time. The balance can tip from defender to attacker overnight, and back again the night after. Computer security defenses are inherently very fragile.
“That isn’t a new idea. I said much the same thing in the preface to my 2000 book, Secrets and Lies:
“‘Cryptography is a branch of mathematics. And like all mathematics, it involves numbers, equations, and logic. Security, real security that you or I might find useful in our lives, involves people: things people know, relationships between people, people and how they relate to machines. Digital security involves computers: complex, unstable, buggy computers.’
“I especially like how I phrased it in 2016: ‘Cryptography is harder than it looks, primarily because it looks like math. Both algorithms and protocols can be precisely defined and analyzed. This isn’t easy, and there’s a lot of insecure crypto out there, but we cryptographers have gotten pretty good at getting this part right. However, math has no agency; it can’t actually secure anything. For cryptography to work, it needs to be written in software, embedded in a larger software system, managed by an operating system, run on hardware, connected to a network, and configured and operated by users. Each of these steps brings with it difficulties and vulnerabilities.’
“It’s a lesson we have all learned over the decades. Cryptography is still necessary for cybersecurity—although I wouldn’t have used that word back then—but is not sufficient. There are particular attack and forms of mass surveillance that cryptography prevents. But as computers have infused throughout our lives, and networks have connected all those computers, those aspects of cybersecurity have become increasingly important, and vulnerable.
“Today, the cybersecurity world is changing yet again, this time due to the capabilities of artificial intelligence. AI isn’t advancing cryptography, but it’s changing cybersecurity. AI has demonstrated a superhuman ability to find vulnerabilities in software and to write exploits. A similar ability to write patches is probably coming. This has profound implications for both attackers and defenders, and it is unclear who will win the particular arms race in a world of what I call instant software.”