It happens that I have some degree of familiarity with what people nowadays call "security", as at the moment of writing this essay I am pursuing my PhD1 in operating systems security, a topic which is currently quite fashionable, although it wasn't (as) fashionable when I started studying it2.
Fashion aside, one must remember that security has existed as a term long before the appearance of computers. Let us defer to our friend Merriam-Webster:
- Simple Definition of security
the state of being protected or safe from harm
things done to make people or places safe
the area in a place (such as an airport) where people are checked to make sure they are not carrying weapons or other illegal materials
For the moment we can leave aside the fact that the last definition is outrageously meant to educate plebs that they oughta become subject to controls in the airport, or else; even more simply put, security is that state where people don't need to fear invaders pillaging their goods, raping their wives and bombing their train stations. From this one may derive more specific definitions, such as that of security as a financial asset or as a property of computing systems.
This stake being set in the ground, the educated citizen of the world must acknowledge that security is not something that can be mathematically or scientifically proven, despite several claims to the fact3. Scientifically proving that "something is secure" is not much different from showing that masturbation causes skin degeneration: the maths might work in some spherical-chicken-in-vacuum cases, but they can, and if they can then they will fail in most real situations.
That isn't to say that there is no such thing as an abstract definition or model of security. The most intuitive way to look at a system's security would be to find that which gives it resistance to outside forces. For example the membrane of a biological cell allows some substances to enter and exit it, but not all of them. Similarly, a computer that is physically disconnected from a network will be protected against malicious agents running on said network, as opposed to software running in the broken cloud. Similarly, a country with strict border policies will always be more secure than one allowing unconditional free passage4. And so on.
A fact often overlooked by today's failingly post-religious yet politically correct Western civilization is that there also exists a cultural definition of security. Cultural artifacts, starting from language and continuing with literature, philosophy, science and general knowledge and understanding of life, are what define a group and what separate it from other cultures5. Dickens and Austen are products of British culture because by understanding them you will become somewhat more of an Englishperson, while the Russians can only be permeated by reading through Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Tolstoy et al. Similarly, China is a strong country precisely because you do not easily understand their culture, while the North American post-culture -- or pop culture -- is a good example of poor culture, since it can be too easily permeated, understood and laughed at by almost everyone else, save Africa.
This is also why my PhD thesis may prove to be in the end useless. Today's technical culture is erroneously trying to solve cultural issues using technical means6: people bitch about privacy issues, but they use the all-snooping Facebook to communicate and ever-snooping Google to find things; they want to keep their data safe, but they use cloud services; ultimately, they prefer convenience at the cost of responsibility. The bad thing about this is that this is spreading through other fields (say, education), and the mind-numbingly worse thing is that nature induces (often hidden) costs for everything we do.
The trade-off is simple, albeit not provable scientifically. One can either choose to become human and fight until the end of their days to get themselves removed from the tar pit that is inculture, or they can choose to trust Facebook, Google, or for that matter the Big Brothers that were/are Hitler, Stalin and NSA, and be left with nothing of their own. Or as a very wise man once said7:
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
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The reader must remember that PhD degrees don't hold the same value as they did, say, fifty years ago. This is mainly due to causes of academic hogwash. ↩
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This was a while before Heartbleed, Shellshock and their no less damaging follow-ups. At the time people were only starting to scratch the surface of Android's -- which is what people initially thought would be a fundamentally "more secure" operating system -- shortcomings, despite the fact that Android doesn't really address any real fundamental issues currently being researched in the field of operating system design. ↩
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Back when I started my PhD, I was deeply fascinated by seL4. Having grown a little, I now understand that employing an army of mathematicians to solve the intractable problem of proving the correctness of a kernel will neither protect against system designers who misunderstand the OS kernel they're using, nor against faulty hardware -- see Wojtczuk and Rutkowska's 2009 paper and Domas' 2015 paper on Intel CPU exploits, to name only a couple of examples. ↩
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In case you're wondering why the Schengen agreement is now proven to be a failure. Also read Popescu's post on the matter. ↩
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This is for example how the Japanese, despite being a few people, survived throughout the millenia, only to be labeled as xenophobic by the stupid Westerners of our time. ↩
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Of the "AI is going to improve our lives in so many ways" sorts. We are however not so keen to evaluate the ways in which AI will make our lives more miserable, or the ways in which we will make ourselves more miserable in order to fit the world views of AI. This too will be part of Westerners' undoing. ↩
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From Ben Franklin's Reply to the Governor, supposedly available online when the site isn't down. ↩
A coda to this piece would be that: "cultural domination" is a self-defeating proposition. The proposition that every soul in the world will end up with the same mores, habits, traditions and so on and so forth is entirely nonsensical, since by the time everyone and their dog eats McDonald's and watches CNN(N), McDonald's and CNN(N) will be stripped of their sense and eventually they will be utterly corrupted into unexistence. Such things cannot survive by their very nature, since nature abhors vacuums, totality ending up being simply nothing.
This is simply how empires fail, through the reduction of their culture towards the smallest possible point in the space of ideas.
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