Bruce Schneier

1963– · American computer scientist (born 1963)

Topics: security, life, software design, engineering leadership

• It's certainly easier to implement bad security and make it illegal for anyone to notice than it is to implement good security.

  — Bruce Schneier

• Well-designed security systems fail gracefully.

  — Bruce Schneier

• When my mother gets a prompt 'Do you want to download this?' she's going to say yes. It's disingenuous for Microsoft to give you all of these tools [in Internet Explorer] with which to hang yourself, and when you do, then say it's your fault.

  — Bruce Schneier

• Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can't break.

  — Bruce Schneier

• More people are killed every year by pigs than by sharks, which shows you how good we are at evaluating risk.

  — Bruce Schneier

• The very definition of news is something that hardly ever happens. If an incident is in the news, we shouldn't worry about it. It's when something is so common that its no longer news – car crashes, domestic violence – that we should worry.

  — Bruce Schneier

• The lesson here is that it is insufficient to protect ourselves with laws; we need to protect ourselves with mathematics. Encryption is too important to be left solely to governments.

  — Bruce Schneier

• Only amateurs attack machines; professionals target people.

  — Bruce Schneier

• A few years ago I heard a quotation, and I am going to modify it here: If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don't understand the problems and you don't understand the technology.

  — Bruce Schneier

• Digital files cannot be made uncopyable, any more than water can be made not wet.

  — Bruce Schneier

• Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.

  — Bruce Schneier

• Attacks always get better, they never get worse.

  — Bruce Schneier

• Chaos is hard to create, even on the Internet. Here's an example. Go to Amazon.com. Buy a book without using SSL. Watch the total lack of chaos.

  — Bruce Schneier

• Technical problems can be remediated. A dishonest corporate culture is much harder to fix.

  — Bruce Schneier

• There are two kinds of cryptography in this world: cryptography that will stop your kid sister from reading your files, and cryptography that will stop major governments from reading your files.

  — Bruce Schneier

• Against the average user, anything works; there's no need for complex security software. Against the skilled attacker, on the other hand, nothing works.

  — Bruce Schneier

• In China, programs have to be certified by the government in order to be used on computers there, which sounds an awful lot like the Apple store.

  — Bruce Schneier