Dan Griffin's Blog
Comments on security, PKI, smart cards, cryptography, and entrepreneurship.
Shamir’s Law
February 6, 2007
Based on well-known cryptographer Adi Shamir’s observation that computer system security has gotten steadily harder since the glory days of the early 1980s - when a PC had no hard drive and the operating system was stored on read-only media - the crypto panel at the RSA conference today proposed "Shamir’s Law":
"Every 18 months, computer security gets 50% worse"
I’m not really doing justice to the full context of that comment, but whatever. Nevertheless, if consumers and enterprise users alike didn’t have all of these networked devices - PCs, cell phones, mp3 players, game consoles - then people in the information security field wouldn’t have such challenging problems to work on …
One other bizarre comment from the panel: Whitfield Diffie (another famous cryptographer) asked that, hereafter, his name always be spelled "Whitfield," yet pronounced "Whit".
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