Defcon Lockpickers Open Card-And-Code Government Locks In Seconds

Re:Defcon Lockpickers Open Card-And-Code Government Locks In... by Groxx on Sunday August 07, 2011 @11:24PM (#2858629)

I wonder, though, if that's their reasoning, or if they'd rather have another complicated layer in place instead. It might just be mimicry - people doing illegal things have hired guns, and it seems to work reasonably well for them - without actually understanding why it works when expensive techniques (which they don't fully comprehend) fail.

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Re:Defcon Lockpickers Open Card-And-Code Government Locks In... by fourk on Monday August 08, 2011 @12:07AM (#2858724)

I think that it has less to do with why the technical obstacles can be overcome and more to do with the fact that they can be overcome. Unless a technical obstacle can be 100% secure, having an additional layer of security in the form of armed gunmen is useful.

The layer of armed gunmen is obviously not 100% reliable either, but requires an entirely separate domain of skills/knowledge/resources to overcome than technical obstacles.

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Re:Defcon Lockpickers Open Card-And-Code Government Locks In... by jpitz on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @11:44AM (#2864417)

I've served in the military. We had an asset we needed to secure - not nukes, but fairly important. We did the risk analysis and wound up with this layered approach: big thick blast-, TEMPEST-, and EMP-resistant door, retinal scan identification system, and an armed guard ( enlisted, not contracted ) 24/7. There was other stuff too. I don't remember it all - it was 1996 fer cryin out loud.

Complicated systems fail in unpredictable ways, and we understood that. We absolutely did _not_ want to depend on technical means only.

Maybe some organizations behave the way you suggest, but IMHO it is far more rare than you think.

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