Home Security

Posted on September 16, 2007 in Security

Saying Bruce Schneier speaks words of wisdom is like saying that Meryl Streep gave a fine performance in her latest film. It’s a given:

We have sold the average computer user a bill of goods. In our race for an ever-increasing market, we have convinced every person that he needs a computer. We have provided application after application — IM, peer-to-peer file sharing, eBay, Facebook — to make computers both useful and enjoyable to the home user. At the same time, we’ve made them so hard to maintain that only a trained sysadmin can do it.

And then we wonder why home users have such problems with their buggy systems, why they can’t seem to do even the simplest administrative tasks, and why their computers aren’t secure. They’re not secure because home users don’t know how to secure them.

At work, I have an entire IT department I can call on if I have a problem. They filter my net connection so that I don’t see spam, and most attacks are blocked before they even get to my computer. They tell me which updates to install on my system and when. And they’re available to help me recover if something untoward does happen to my system. Home users have none of this support. They’re on their own.

This problem isn’t simply going to go away as computers get smarter and users get savvier. The next generation of computers will be vulnerable to all sorts of different attacks, and the next generation of attack tools will fool users in all sorts of different ways. The security arms race isn’t going away any time soon, but it will be fought with ever more complex weapons.

This isn’t simply an academic problem; it’s a public health problem. In the hyper-connected world of the Internet, everyone’s security depends in part on everyone else’s. As long as there are insecure computers out there, hackers will use them to eavesdrop on network traffic, send spam, and attack other computers. We are all more secure if all those home computers attached to the Internet via DSL or cable modems are protected against attack. The only question is: what’s the best way to get there?

I wonder about those who say “educate the users.” Have they tried? Have they ever met an actual user? It’s unrealistic to expect home users to be responsible for their own security. They don’t have the expertise, and they’re not going to learn. And it’s not just user actions we need to worry about; these computers are insecure right out of the box.