Bruce Schneier Quotes

Attacks always get better, they never get worse.

In China, programs have to be certified by the government in order to be used on computers there, which sounds an awful lot like the Apple store.

Digital files cannot be made uncopyable, any more than water can be made not wet.

A few years ago I heard a quotation, and I am going to modify it here: If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don't understand the problems and you don't understand the technology.

I mean, the computer industry promises nothing. Did you ever read a shrink-wrapped license agreement? You should read one. It basically says, if this product deliberately kills your children, and we knew it would, and we decided not to tell you because it might harm sales, we're not liable. I mean, it says stuff like that. They're absurd documents. You have no rights.

There are two kinds of cryptography in this world: cryptography that will stop your kid sister from reading your files, and cryptography that will stop major governments from reading your files.

When my mother gets a prompt 'Do you want to download this?' she's going to say yes. It's disingenuous for Microsoft to give you all of these tools [in Internet Explorer] with which to hang yourself, and when you do, then say it's your fault.

It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state.

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act. And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want.

Every time I write about the impossibility of effectively protecting digital files on a general-purpose computer, I get responses from people decrying the death of copyright. "How will authors and artists get paid for their work?" they ask me. Truth be told, I don't know. I feel rather like the physicist who just explained to a group of would-be interstellar travelers, only to be asked: "How do you expect us to get to the stars, then?" I'm sorry, but I don't know that, either.

Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can't break.

Technical problems can be remediated. A dishonest corporate culture is much harder to fix.

Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers. Seems like you can scare any public into allowing the government to do anything with those four.

Well-designed security systems fail gracefully.

Only amateurs attack machines; professionals target people.