Re: Rhetorical gestures

Oh that's marvelous!

Security: the best gluten free organically grown oat bran Christmas
fruitcake money can buy!


On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 3:47 PM, Chip Morningstar <[email protected]> wrote:

> 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
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