{"id":43,"date":"2008-11-14T23:43:40","date_gmt":"2008-11-14T23:43:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=43"},"modified":"2008-11-15T05:14:15","modified_gmt":"2008-11-15T05:14:15","slug":"security-vs-obscurity-there-is-a-debate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=43","title":{"rendered":"Security vs. obscurity: there is a debate?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I just received the latest Microsoft security newsletter, and I was surprised to find that according to Microsoft, <a href=\"http:\/\/technet.microsoft.com\/en-us\/magazine\/cc510319.aspx\">there is a debate<\/a> about security vs. obscurity. Which may go a long way towards explaining why Microsoft products are so notorious when it comes to their (lack of) security!<\/p>\n<p>That is not to say that there are no valid points in favor of obscurity measures; as the example discussed by Microsoft clearly demonstrates, it is always beneficial to make an attacker&#8217;s life a little harder. But it is a real stretch to call this a &#8220;debate&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>That is because it is not an either-or proposition. You can <em>never<\/em> have security through obscurity, and no amount of obscurity will make an otherwise unsecure system secure. But the security of a well-secured system can be improved by a little bit of obscurity, and in that sense, obscurity can supplement (but never replace) real security.<\/p>\n<p>Reading on, it seems to me that some of the contributors to Microsoft&#8217;s &#8220;Great Debate&#8221; realize this. Too bad the person in charge of giving the article its title didn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n<fb:like href='https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=43' send='true' layout='standard' show_faces='true' width='450' height='65' action='like' colorscheme='light' font='lucida grande'><\/fb:like>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I just received the latest Microsoft security newsletter, and I was surprised to find that according to Microsoft, there is a debate about security vs. obscurity. Which may go a long way towards explaining why Microsoft products are so notorious when it comes to their (lack of) security! That is not to say that there <a href='https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/?p=43' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet","category-6-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=43"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions\/45"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=43"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=43"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spinor.info\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=43"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}