Schneier on Security

antibozo • December 30, 2005 3:02 PM

The real problem is that somehow it has become accepted practice for the financial industry to abuse SSN as a pre-selected shared password. This is stupid beyond belief and shouldn’t be tolerated. SSN shouldn’t need to be a big honking secret–no more than the checking account number that is printed on the face of every check you write. It’s an account number with SSA; that’s all. It is by no means suitable key material–it is known by too many people and it is even highly predictable from other personal information (go read up on area and group numbers). It is also difficult (but not impossible) to change, which no key should be. But since it /is/ possible to change, it is also not a suitable unique identifier for any individual.

The obvious solution is for everyone to publish his or her SSN everywhere possible–put it in your .signature, post it on blogs, take out an ad in the newspaper, write it on a bumper sticker, etc. If everyone published SSN, mother’s maiden name, and any other lame excuse for a password that lazy corporate idiots have decided to use to protect access to our livelihoods, the problem would go away because the banks and corporate office drones would have to get off their fat asses and actually come up with a secure system for us to establish real passwords (or other authenticators).

An alternative would be a law requiring SSA to publicly disclose all SSNs. I’m afraid it will be a long time, however, before enough people realize what a state of total moronitude we’ve become enmeshed in. Until then, we’re all looking over our shoulders because we let the greedy corporate banking people (and to a lesser extent human resources bozos) implement vast systems without the fundamental security measure of password management.