Presented at
Kiwicon 4: The four e:Sheep-persons of the Cyber Infopocalypse (2010),
Nov. 28, 2010, 11 a.m.
(30 minutes)
The field of computer security contains many tough problems. Some of them though go beyond simply being hard to being completely unsolvable. This doesn't mean that they're merely currently unsolved, but that they have no general solution, or at least no technology-based one. Using the concept of wicked problems from the field of social planning, this talk looks at some of the more notable - and troublesome - unsolvable problems in computer security. While pointing out that certain problems are in general unsolvable presents a bit of a conundrum, identifying this fact may allow them to be addressed at the business-model or political rather than the technological level.
Presenters:
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Peter Gutmann
Peter Gutmann is a researcher in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Auckland working on design and analysis of cryptographic security architectures and security usability. He helped write the popular PGP encryption package, has authored a number of papers and RFC's on security and encryption, and is the author of the open source cryptlib security toolkit. In his spare time he pokes holes in whatever security systems and mechanisms catch his attention and grumbles about the lack of consideration of human factors in designing security systems.
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