Schneier on Security

(Italian version)

IsacaRoma: Who are you? Your biography says you are an author, technologist and a “security guru.”  What is your cultural background?  How did you arrive at cryptography and security as a profession?

Bruce Schneier: Security is a mindset, and the best security experts come by the profession naturally.  They constantly go about the world looking at how to get around security: how to vote twice, how to shoplift, how to sneak in and out.  They probably won’t do any of these things, but they’re always thinking about them.

My background is physics and computer science, and I started working in cryptography first for the U.S. government and then as a consultant.  The interesting thing about being a consultant is that you get to work on a wide variety of different problems.  Many of these problems suggested avenues of research, which further broadened my interests…