Pick a random headline related to security today and you’ll see lots of exclamation points and dire warnings about the insecurity of a something we thought was inviolate, such as Apple Pay or TLS. It’s enough to make you jump out of your skin and crawl into a dark hole somewhere never to use electricity again. Until you read the article, that is. After going through a couple of paragraphs, you realize that a click-bait headline about a new technology actually underscores an age-old problem: people are the weakest link.

Engineered To Be Social

We can engineer security for protocols and systems until the cows come home. We can use ciphers so complicated that even Deep Thought couldn’t figure them out. We can create a system so secure that it could never be hacked. But in the end that system needs to be used by people. And people are where everything breaks down.

Take the most recent Apple Pay “exploit” in the news that’s been making all the headlines. The problem has nothing to do with Apple Pay itself, or the way the device interacts with the point-of-sale terminal. It has everything to do with enterprising crooks calling in to banks an impersonating users to get a live, breathing person on the other end of the phone to override security safeguards and break the system down. An hourly employee of the bank can put all the defense-in-depth research to naught in a matter of keystrokes.

It is the way it is because people are dumb, panicky, and dangerous. When confronted with situations that are outside their norm they tend to freeze up and do the wrong thing. Take this scene from Sneakers (which is an excellent movie you should go watch right now):

When I originally started writing this post, that scene stuck out in my mind as a brilliant way to illustrate how less-than-savory people get around high technology with simple solutions, like kicking in a door protected by a keypad. But then I watched the scene again and found an even better example of my point. Look how Robert Redford and River Phoenix work together to distract and eventually overwhelm the security guard. The guard knows that no one should be able to get through the gate without the right keycard. With a bit of distraction, some added stress, and an apparently helpless but irritated user, Redford is able to social engineer his way into the building with little effort. The movie is full of these kinds of scenes.

The point is not that Robert Redford can talk his way into a building. The point that should be illustrated is that people override security decisions every day. Writing down passwords. Ignoring security warnings. Clicking on believable but fake exploits. It’s done because it’s quicker or easier or it’s done to remove a screaming customer on the other end of the phone. Polices are ignored and shortcuts are taken to make things easy. So how do we fix it?

Teach It, Don’t Tech It

The absolute last thing you should do when trying to fix these issues is to create another layer of technology to insulate the issue. That leads to two problems. The first is that people will being to see the new solution as yet another problem and try to create shortcuts to work around it. The second, which is a more sinister issue, is that you’ve essentially told those people that they can’t understand why this is a problem and you’ve decided to marginalize them instead of teaching them. They may not realize it, but you’ve silently placed them lower on the intelligence ladder than a few bytes of code.

People need to know why things are the way they are. If the policy says not to write down a password, tell people why that is. If the rules say you don’t override a lockout for a PIN or add a card to a person’s account without certain information then you need to tell people why you don’t do that. A policy or security feature without an explanation is merely an annoyance. One that will be circumvented. Making your users aware of the reason for a policy makes it something that’s hard to ignore. You’re more likely to get traction by treating your users like people, not automatons.

Tom’s Take

Kevin Mitnick (@KevinMitnick) wrote an entire book about social engineering and how easy it is to accomplish. As security systems become more complicated and much less simple to fool, the majority of miscreants aren’t going to spend hours upon hours trying to hack a handshake protocol or create hash collisions. Instead, they will attack the weakest link in the chain. That will almost undoubtedly be the users of the system. We have to make our users smart enough to know when people are trying to take advantage of them and close that loop. Or at least make that loop as difficult to breach as the rest of the system. That’s the only way to be sure that the security measures we put in place can be used to their fullest potential. Just make sure that everyone knows the Eddie Vedder doesn’t work in accounting.