🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1989Dec15.183151.23874@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
> In article <73...@pt.cs.cmu.edu> rjo...@a.gp.cs.cmu.edu (Randolph Jones)
> writes:  After you have been informed of your dismissal, a security
> officer escorts you to your office, watches you clean it out, escorts
> you to the exit and informs you that you should not bother coming to
> work for your last two weeks.  It seems they take the possibility of
> revenge very seriously.
> 
> > Not a new idea.  From the moment a bank employee is known to be leaving
> > -- fired or resigned, makes no difference -- he/she is not allowed to
> > handle cash.

Maybe not a new idea, but not a very effective one (in the hacker
case).  A destructive hacker will plant a time bomb with a dead-man
switch that goes off after he's gone - it could cron "find -mtime +60
~/.newsrc -exec sh death.sh\;" or something (more discretely, of
course).  And you think your data is safe because you back it up on
tape?  Same hacker fixes the backup/restore code to encrypt going out
and decrypt coming back in, so you have usable tapes only as long as
you use the special programs.  Then, boom, the special programs
disappear, and you're really really stuck.  You say that you can
decrypt what's encrypted?  I'm convinced that with a good combination
of compression (which smooths out the distribution of bits) and
encryption, you'd be hard pressed to ever guess how the data was
munged.  Yes, these ideas are nasty, but they're not new.

	Andrew Tannenbaum   Interactive   Cambridge, MA   +1 617 661 7474