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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2024

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  • I worked in software certification under Common Criteria, and while I do know that it creates a lot of work, there were cases where security has been improved measurably - in the hardware department, it even happened that a developer / manufacturer had a breach that affected almost the whole company really badly (design files etc stolen by a probably state sponsored attacker), but not the CC certified part because the attackers used a vector of attack that was caught there and rectified.

    It seemingly was not fixed everywhere for whatever reason… but it’s not that CC certification is just some academic exercise that gives you nothing but a lot of work.

    Is it the right approach for every product? Probably not because of the huge overhead power certified version. But for important pillars of a security model, it makes sense in my opinion.

    Though it needs to be said that the scheme under which I certified is very thorough and strict, so YMMV.





  • Salt the hash with something unique to that specific user so identical passwords have different hashes

    Isn’t that… the very definition of a Salt? A user-specific known string? Though my understanding is that the salt gets appended to the user-provided password, hashed and then checked against the record, so I wouldn’t say that the hash is salted, but rather the password.

    Also using a pepper is good practice in addition to a salt, though the latter is more important.








  • Ich muss dabei leider am dieses Zitat denken, auch wenn es dort um die USA geht:

    I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

    The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.