Rhetorical gestures

Today I was writing an email to one of my co-workers, who is concerned
with security issues, attempting to explain how I thought we should be
thinking about the problem, and this is what came out, which was too
much fun not to share:


A lot of computer security people think of a computational system as
something to be protected as if it was a chocolate Easter egg: a thin
shell enclosing the sweet and yummy creme filling. If you crack the
shell or poke a hole in it, you can easily suck out the contents and
consume them at your leisure. In this view of the world, the obvious
protective strategy is to strengthen the shell: perhaps, by enclosing
the egg in, say, steel rather than chocolate, the contents will thus
be made more secure.  But even a steel shell can be cracked or pierced
with enough effort or the right tools.  I think a better ideal would
be your hippie grandmother's gluten free organically grown oat bran
Christmas fruitcake from 2003, which has only gotten tougher with age
even though you wouldn't think this possible because you suspect she
originally used epoxy as a binding matrix.  It's not that you can't
actually eat the thing, but every bite will be a struggle that hardly
rewards the effort, and getting deeper into it won't make that effort
any easier.

Chip