Hello world
and aloha SecSci students of University of Hawaii. In this blog I (dusko, and I hope other aseconauts as well) will try to flesh out the basic ideas about security, as studied in the Security Science Courses, and in general. The complete course materials are available through laulima. Comments and questions are welcome.
Why are we interested in security?
Surely not all for the same reason. Some people like it because hacking is so cool. Others are interested in nice security jobs. Yet others want to understand security threats that rage in cyber space, and in real life.
But beyond and below all of different views of security, there is a simple common denominator: Security is about people lying and cheating each other. They steal each other’s secrets and money, they impersonate each other, they want to outsmart each other. What can be more fun than that? Or what can be more fun than preventing that?
But how can I prevent people who are smarter than me from outsmarting me? This is where science comes in. Science looks for ways to do things by method, and not by cleverness. When you solve a problem by cleverness, it does not make the next problem any easier; when you solve a problem by method, then the next problem becomes easier, because you have learned the method. That is why security is like science: you never completely achieve the goal, but you build new results based on the old results, and they keep getting better. We’ll get to a general model and concrete examples later. If you don’t want to wait but want to get an idea about this now, you could have a look into my paper about trust building as hypothesis testing, published here.