The Last HOPE
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Don’t quit your day job…

I’m sitting in a meeting at my day job, listening to a prospective vendor lyrically describing their lush infosec management capabilities and my mid morning reverie was broken by the following phrases in rapid succession:

We use a labyrinth of firewalls. Four in series because you can sometimes see past the first few.

I asked what he meant when he said “see past the first few” — he answered something mumbling about traceroute.

We use a proprietary encryption algorithmn.

I’ve read enough Schneier to positively flip out at this one.

The data is protected by 4096-bit MD5 encryption.

Ok… I’m not even going to get into it with this guy.

SSL is not safe for our environment, one of our engineers broke SSL in 3 minutes.

OMFG - YOU BROKE THE INTERNET!!!!1!!! - WTFBBQ

Ahem, May I please attend the special press conference you’re going to call when you release this information? I want to see what happens when the guys with the mirrors on the inside of the glasses take you out with a NATO round to the cranium.

If you want SSL, we’ll change the encryption key once per day.

I’m sorry, did I mis-read the RFC where it describes per session keys?

It’s not that I’m nervous, but, well, I’m nervous. You may all return to your regularly scheduled programme.

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  • kurt wismer said,

    March 31, 2007 @ 11:31 am

    you should submit this to schneier for inclusion in the dog-house… they dug deep and struck snake-oil…

    Liquidmatrix Security Digest » Don’t quit your day job… said,

    April 5, 2007 @ 1:17 pm

    [...] the brilliant folks in last week’s episode… Did we forget to mention that you need to run our customized version of IE6 with our proxy [...]

    myrcurial said,

    April 9, 2007 @ 8:29 am

    @kurt,

    It’s not so much that they struck snake oil as the look on their face when I slid my card across the table and they realized I wasn’t a garden variety IT guy, but the very guy that they really needed to impress. Priceless.

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