Navigating the Attack Surface to achieve a *multiplicative* reduction in risk
Channel: Agoric
Date: 2020-12-10

Mark S. Miller invited mystery talk, December 10, 2020

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g28yRvHKIgc&list=PLzDw4TTug5O0ywHrOz4VevVTYr6Kj_KtW is an extended form of this talk presented at UC Santa Cruz.

Our civilization today rests on infrastructure that is not only insecure, but insecurable.We cannot eliminate risk, but we can be vastly safer. Qualitative arguments have been made for various security architectures, but without any overall framework for comparing them as alternatives or as complements. We present a visualization of the attack surface as a way to reason about aggregate risk, and show how the composition of several techniques --- blockchains, object-capability languages, patterns, protocols, user interfaces, and smart contracts --- can produce a multiplicative decrease in risk without loss of functionality.