Schneier on Security

Bruce Schneier is a security icon, the cryptological equivalent of action-movie superstar Chuck Norris, able to straighten elliptic curves with his bare hands. Liars & Outliers isn’t the book you’d expect from someone whose portrait adorns posters—nor from the coauthor of several important encryption algorithms (one of them a finalist for the next generation of national encryption standards).

On his blog, Schneier reminds us almost daily that protecting our secrets with a 4096-bit key doesn’t do much good if we have to tape the new pass phrase to our monitors, and that an unforgeable ID card can be a very bad idea if someone can get one by slipping 20 bucks to a file clerk. In …