As part of the moving process I got a bank account, and I was reminded, again, of how much the security systems of most online banks are comically flawed, which lead me to even greater anger about security in general. The following rant is what happened.

I should say at first, that I’m not really a security expert, and I just dabble in this stuff. Having said that…

“Security” online and in a digital context covers two pretty distinct aspects:

  • Identity. In real life we can show our drivers license or passport, we can say “I’m [insert name here],” and in many situations another person is probably not too far away to be able to say, “I know them, they’re [insert name here].” Online? Well identity is less easily and reliably verified. Identity is important both for individual’s (and organizations') identity and for things that people (and organizations) produce/own: emails, documents, web pages, software, and so forth.
  • Encryption. Basically we encrypt data so that we can be relatively certain that no one gains access to our data unless, by listening into our network connection, or gaining access to physical media. From encryption we get privacy, and as long as the encryption scheme works as it should and the encryption covers communications end-to-end, it’s pretty safe to assume some measure of privacy.

It turns out, from a technical perspective that encryption is reasonably easy to achieve. It’s true that all cryptographic schemes are ultimately breakable, however, if we can generally assume best practices (expiring old keys, keeping your private keys safe, etc.) then I feel fairly safe in asserting that encryption isn’t the weak part of the security equation.

This leaves identity on the table. Which is sort of a messy affair.

Just because someone says, “Hello my name is Alice,” it doesn’t mean that they are Alice. Just because they have Alice’s password, doesn’t necessarily mean that they are Alice (but that’s a safer bet.) The best, and most reliable way to verify someones identity, it turns out, to have a “web of trust.”

Which basically means, you assert that you are who you say you are, and then “vouch” for other people who you “know” are who they say they are. Once you’ve vouched for someone you then “trust” that the people they’ve vouched for, and so forth. Good web-of-trust systems allow you to revoke trust, and provide some mechanism for propagating trusted networks of identities among users.

The above described system is a very peer-to-peer/ad hoc system (bottom up, if you will), there are also more centralized (top down,) systems which can also function to verify identity in a digital context. These systems depend on commonly trusted third parties that are tasked with researching and verifying the identity of individuals and organization. So called “certificate authorities,” make it possible to “trust identities” of without needing a personal web-of-trust network extend to cover people and organizations you’d come in contact with.

Lets bring this back to the case study of the bank,

They encrypt their traffic, end to end, with SSL (eg. TLS), they pay for a certificate from a certificate authority with a good reputation. The weak part of this equation? You and Me, apparently.

To verify our identity, we have this arcane and convoluted scheme where by we have to enter hard to remember passwords in stages (my last bank, had us enter passwords on three pages in succession) so that the back can be sure we’re who we say we are. And the sad part is that while encryption and identity verification technology in secure and reliable ways is pretty advanced (in the big picture), we still have to send passwords. Here are my thoughts on passwords:

  • The best passwords are the hardest to remember. The best passwords don’t contain words, and contain numbers, letters, and punctuation. But these passwords are difficult to remember, and I think many people avoid picking truly secure passwords because of the difficulty.

  • Passwords aren’t bad, and they’re--I suspect--most useful as a casual deterrent and a reminder to users of the potential gravity of the situation; but they’re not exactly a reliable fingerprinting mechanism.

  • Some sort of cryptographic handshake would be many magnitudes more secure, and much less painless for users.

    I have this theory, that security for banks (and other similar institutions) is more about giving the appearance of being secure (asking for more complex passwords, making you jump through more hoops, etc.) and less about doing things that would be more secure in the long run. But maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, back onto more general interest topics in the near future.