“Security, Moore’s Law, and the Anomaly of Cheap Complexity”, 2018-05-29 (; backlinks; similar):
CyCon 2019, Keynote: “Security, Moore’s law, and the anomaly of cheap complexity”:
I was invited to Keynote CyCon, and my talk was supposed to be right before Bruce Schneier’s talk. I tried hard to make a talk that is accessible to people with a non-technical and non-engineering background, which nonetheless summarized the important things I had learnt about security. The core points are:
CPUs are much more complex than 20 years ago, the feeling of being overwhelmed by complexity is not an illusion.
We are sprinkling chips into objects like we are putting salt on food.
We do this because complexity is cheaper than simplicity. We often use a cheap but complex computer to simulate a much simpler device for cost and convenience.
The inherent complexity/power of the underlying computer has a tendency to break to the surface as soon as something goes wrong.
Discrete Dynamical Systems and computers share many properties, and tiny changes have a tendency to cause large changes quickly.
This may be the most polished talk I have ever given—I did multiple dry-runs with different audiences, and bothered everybody and his dog with the slides.
I am particularly proud that Bruce Schneier seemed to have liked it; this is a big thing for me because reading “Applied Cryptography” and “A self-study course in block-cipher cryptanalysis” had a pretty substantial impact on my life.