Re:Stories that Hacker News removes from the front page
by dsacco on Monday March 13, 2017 @11:04AM
(#13858372)
What does "verifiably" mean for you? Are you talking about provable security?
First establish an upper bound, worst case scenario cost (as a function of time + resources) to fully reverse engineer the algorithm. Use that as the comparison benchmark, and if you can come up with a design that eliminates any reverse engineering efforts with fewer costs than worst-case, you've done it.
Here's where that breaks down: "ungameable" is not precise enough to establish worst-case bounds for, in the same way that we can establish worst-case bounds for breaking an MD5 hash (brute-force it - what does "brute-force it" mean for gaming a ranking algorithm, or reverse engineering more generally?). Other than that, were you to come up with such a measurement, it would almost assuredly increase the costs of reverse engineering to infeasibility by increasing the authorization controls in place and decreasing the usability requirements.
First establish an upper bound, worst case scenario cost (as a function of time + resources) to fully reverse engineer the algorithm. Use that as the comparison benchmark, and if you can come up with a design that eliminates any reverse engineering efforts with fewer costs than worst-case, you've done it.
Here's where that breaks down: "ungameable" is not precise enough to establish worst-case bounds for, in the same way that we can establish worst-case bounds for breaking an MD5 hash (brute-force it - what does "brute-force it" mean for gaming a ranking algorithm, or reverse engineering more generally?). Other than that, were you to come up with such a measurement, it would almost assuredly increase the costs of reverse engineering to infeasibility by increasing the authorization controls in place and decreasing the usability requirements.