On the other hand, negotiators are pressured to come to some agreement, and a "compromise" halfway between the global consensus and one lone holdout isn't a true compromise -- it's extortion by a global power.
If the secrecy of the documents is supposed to protect that kind of extortion by major powers -- for instance, on the part of US negotiators insisting that the rest of the world honor US IP standards -- then they should be publicly named and shamed, not hidden by "the process", under the guise that their all-or-nothing extortion is a reasonable practice.
I think it's very likely that the secrecy is meant to hide bad actions on the part of some negotiators representing powerful interests, and not for the true benefit of the constituents the negotiators are (theoretically) representing. I think the entirety of the fast tracking process in the US (and other nations), the secrecy around the negotiations, etc is at the behest of and for the benefit of major powers extorting other people, and shouldn't be respected, at all.
Do you have some reasons to suppose that it's otherwise, given the nature of the drafts we've seen and leaked comments from negotiators suggesting that the US negotiating team is attempting to extort the world in to accepting the (rather ridiculous) US IP position?
My point was that you had missed a key component: compartmentalization.
To use something that's more in the middle: you'd want to use a password manager per client (for sure) and probably divide low-security and high-security credentials.
It's just that the remote SSH servers at my job are fundamentally an expediency meant for emergency situations, and often can only be used once without being reset, eg, locking the account after a single session and requiring someone from inside the network to unlock it (after setting a new, one-time password).
In this sense, their security is primarily that I must compartmentalize each emergency server, and only use it during the appropriate emergency. However, during emergencies, the nature of the emergencies overrides the risk of compromise when accessing those commands, which typically are just specific scripts run from a locked down account.
Thus the security of the system depends on my ability to keep emergency credentials compartmentalized when using a different set, so that way only a single set of emergency commands are available to an attacker at a time -- and only when they're commands related to an already failed system.
Thus the security of the system is best preserved by strategies which highly compartmentalize the credentials, since they're meant to be used on potentially unsafe systems only during emergencies.
I guess I just remember 3-4 passwords like it's my job to -- because it is.
> I also want to take a moment to make fun of people measuring character passwords in bits (as opposed to characters).
You took an uncharitable interpretation of something another person said using standard jargon you apparently don't understand, and then went off on a rant doing exactly the thing you deride.
> The whole bits thing started when people are contrasting character based passwords with other types of passwords like certificate based (as a way of showing how much more secure certificate based authentication is).
You've misunderstood the discussion around this: it's about the bits of entropy used in the generation of passwords, all of which are digital in nature (or as you put it, in "characters"), and not how many bits it takes to store the character in the password.
Talking about "bits of entropy" related to a password means a password generated by a process using that many bits of entropy, regardless of how long its output is. It's the way to talk about passwords independent of encoding, since it talks only about their information theoretical content (stemming from the manner they were generated).
Thus, talking about "a password with X bits of entropy" is standard industry jargon for "a password generated by a technique which consumes X bits of entropy", without disambiguation between binary keys, randomly chosen characters, or randomly chosen words. (They all have the same cryptographic strength, for a given number of bits of entropy.)
tl;dr: You were overly literal and seem to have misunderstood standard industry jargon, and then gone off on a nonsense rant.
> password manager on an encrypted thumbdrive, along with your gpg key and private ssh key with the decryption password + password manager password being the only ones you remember
You have to give the system both passwords to use the thumb drive, except that these passwords, rather than being compartmentalized as currently is the practice, can steal literally every key I need to have portable with me.
By contrast, if I just type in a single password to the system, it can only even potentially the system to which that password corresponds.
Your system drastically increases the failure modes of the whole system, from a single password to a known edge server, which can be locked down on the server side, to a potential compromise of every password.
> The best mitigation is to only remember passwords that are only useful in conjunction with physical access (the password manager / decryption ones).
This is extremely bad advice: the best mitigation is to require two factors, not a single factor. Your strategy is inherently two single factor systems, not a two factor system. This is what gives its ability for cascades of compromise.
The correct way to do this would be to have the keys corresponding to each server represent an XOR of your password for that server with a base key stored on a physical device, combining the two pieces of information to generate the final key. This reduces the effects from the compromise of your thumb drive from "full compromise of all systems" to "reduced to password based authentication".
Please be more careful in your recommendations in the future.
I don't think at the level of the article that it's inappropriate to assume that the reader is at least familiar with the term "hashing", and can wait on the technical details of the particular types of hashing functions needed for bloom filters until the second or third section.
I honestly just closed the article when he started in on hashing, because I want to know about bloom filters (which I don't know about), not the basics of hashing (which I learned as an undergrad, and need to know day-to-day as a working programmer).
There are technical approaches to the problem, it's just that they're not ready yet.
However (and without revealing too much about specific IP), there are various mathematical techniques that can be used to discuss the privacy disclosing properties of queries against a set of data and ways in which you can force the data to be both fuzzy and self-destructing.
The reality is that customers (rightly) won't see a difference between analytics companies until one of them actually puts their money where their mouth is on privacy, and removes personal data from being an asset than can be sold or combined later (both by limiting number of queries to prevent reconstruction and with fuzzing applied to prevent over-targeting).
For those looking for some technical details: I work at a marketing company (we're early stage start-up, so I don't want to name names, as we're not really ready for attention), and we're currently in the process of developing a technology which fuses the research in to what questions you can ask of a database (and how many) before the privacy is depleted with non-fully-homomorphic encryption, which destabilizes after a period of time. This approach will let us build containers which homomorphically process data, and decay in a number of questions less than the number which would deplete the privacy of the data in the container. (For various reasons, operating in homomorphic space gives you increasingly fuzzy answers the more questions you ask, and thus you cross a probability bound on your answer being useless near when the privacy is depleted.)
While this isn't perfect, since you still need to trust that we're both a) not storing the base keys and b) did our math/implementation correctly, it's a substantial improvement over the trust asked for by marketing companies now. (Especially since contracts could require us to do those things fairly easily, thus exposing us to breach of contract if we failed to. Once those actions are properly completed, there's no taking them back, so our technology mainly protects the case of "We're the good guys now, but tomorrow is a different day".)
If the secrecy of the documents is supposed to protect that kind of extortion by major powers -- for instance, on the part of US negotiators insisting that the rest of the world honor US IP standards -- then they should be publicly named and shamed, not hidden by "the process", under the guise that their all-or-nothing extortion is a reasonable practice.
I think it's very likely that the secrecy is meant to hide bad actions on the part of some negotiators representing powerful interests, and not for the true benefit of the constituents the negotiators are (theoretically) representing. I think the entirety of the fast tracking process in the US (and other nations), the secrecy around the negotiations, etc is at the behest of and for the benefit of major powers extorting other people, and shouldn't be respected, at all.
Do you have some reasons to suppose that it's otherwise, given the nature of the drafts we've seen and leaked comments from negotiators suggesting that the US negotiating team is attempting to extort the world in to accepting the (rather ridiculous) US IP position?