security through obscurity
<security> Or "security by obscurity". A term applied by hackers to most
operating system vendors' favourite way of coping with security holes - namely,
ignoring them, documenting neither any known holes nor the underlying security
algorithms, trusting that nobody will find out about them and that people who do
find out about them won't exploit them. This never works for long and
occasionally sets the world up for debacles like the RTM worm of 1988 (see Great
Worm), but once the brief moments of panic created by such events subside most
vendors are all too willing to turn over and go back to sleep. After all,
actually fixing the bugs would siphon off the resources needed to implement the
next user-interface frill on marketing's wish list - and besides, if they
started fixing security bugs customers might begin to *expect* it and imagine
that their warranties of merchantability gave them some sort of rights.
Historical note: There are conflicting stories about the origin of this term. It
has been claimed that it was first used in the Usenet newsgroup in
comp.sys.apollo during a campaign to get HP/Apollo to fix security problems in
its Unix-clone Aegis/DomainOS (they didn't change a thing). ITS fans, on the
other hand, say it was coined years earlier in opposition to the incredibly
paranoid Multics people down the hall, for whom security was everything. In the
ITS culture it referred to (1) the fact that by the time a tourist figured out
how to make trouble he'd generally got over the urge to make it, because he felt
part of the community; and (2) (self-mockingly) the poor coverage of the
documentation and obscurity of many commands. One instance of *deliberate*
security through obscurity is recorded; the command to allow patching the
running ITS system (altmode altmode control-R) echoed as $$^D. If you actually
typed alt alt ^D, that set a flag that would prevent patching the system even if
you later got it right.
[Jargon File]
(1994-12-15)
Nearby terms:
Security Administrator's Integrated Network Tool «
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security through obscurity » SED » Sed » SEE
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