[Discuss] Most common (or Most important) privacy leaks

[kentborg at borg.org (Kent Borg)]

Passwords have serious problems, but they are bit like the problems with 
one-time-pads: cumbersome but otherwise perfect.

There is never going to be a generalized crack of the "password system". 
Even with some fancy Quantum Cryptography, passwords are not about to 
suffer a catastrophic failure. Flawed as they are in use, passwords are 
a solid tool in principle.

All the alternatives do risk major to gigantic failures.

Didn't South Korea issue everyone a smartcard, universal, to be used for 
everything? And then we find out they used a crappy random number generator.

All the alternative systems are complicated and brittle. Passwords are 
simple. Distributed. Robust.

Our use of passwords, on the other hand, is terrible. But all the 
alternatives to passwords are worse, so let's start educating everyone. 
Including discarding ages-old dogma that is wrong: Writing down 
passwords is good.

-kb