> They've got, ballpark, $5t to $10t to make back in the next 5 years, or the hardware buildouts will start getting written down.
Depreciation and write-offs are about accounting models. Hardware will still be running after five years and still be making money. They may not be as efficient as the new hardware, but they will still be making real money even though they are valued at $0 in the books.
The strongest arugument made is that hybrid is more complex, more work and therefore more risky.
As someone who has been implementing such systems for 20 years, I don't buy this. In my mind, it's equivalent to saying "Seatbelts add complexity to the safety system, and it's more work. So let's get rid of it."
In this argument, the benefits of hybrid/seatbelts are not factored in adequately.
- Availability is a security requirement. "Availability" of critical assets just as important as "Confidentiality". While this seems like a truism, it is not uncommon to come across system designs, or even NSA/NIST specifications/points-of-view, that contradict this principle.
- Security is more than cryptography. Most secure systems fail or get compromised, not due to cryptanalytic attacks, but due to implementation and OPSEC issues.
Lastly, I am disappointed that IACR is publicly framing the root cause as an "unfortunate human mistake", and thereby throwing a distinguished member of the community under the bus. This is a system design issue; no critical system should have 3 of 3 quorum requirement. Devices die. Backups fail. People quit. People forget. People die. Anyone who has worked with computers or people know that this is what they do sometimes.
IACR's system design should have accounted for this. I wish IACR took accountability for the system design failure. I am glad that IACR is addressing this "human mistake" by making a "system design change" to 2 of 3 quorum.
It is quite negligent that they are not using the threshold decryption ceremony, but at the same time, I don't think we should dismiss the framing of human mistake here. Even if there were a threshold decryption ceremony in place, such a failure mode could still happen; here, it simply makes it more visible. The question of how one would select the threshold seems pertinent.
A small threshold reduces privacy, whereas a large threshold makes human error or deliberate sabotage attempts more likely. What is the optimum here? How do we evaluate the risks?
You are absolutely right that it is easy to rule out obviously bad choices, such as 3 of 3. However, determining the actual quorum to use is a qualitative risk analysis exercise.
Considering that this is an election for a professional organization with thousands of members, I am going to go out on a limb and say that it should be easily possible to assemble a group of 5 people that the community/board trusts woudn't largely collude to break their privacy. If I were in the room, I would have advocated for 3 of 5 quorum.
But the lifecycle of the key is only a few months. That limits the availability risk a little bit, so I can be convinced to support a 2 of 3 quorum, if others feel strongly that the incremental privacy risk introduced by 3 of 5 quorum is unacceptable.
People who have never known about Libre Office are now downloading and using Libre Office (often without realizing it).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49527396
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