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Perhaps you could take this opportunity where you’ve gotten the attention of an audience to, instead of criticize, educate us? I don’t see what’s wrong with this comic at all. It’s saying that if someone really wants to get into your laptop, they can torture you for your credentials. They could similarly ransom/blackmail you or any number of other approaches that don’t involve attempting a brute force decryption.

Perhaps you think the link was to a different comic (maybe the entropy one about the horses and the batteries) and didn’t actually click it?

Sorry, I just edited to add that. But

>I don’t see what’s wrong with this comic at all.

Everything is wrong with that comic.

>It’s saying that if someone really wants to get into your laptop, they can torture you for your credentials.

Can they? Please take a moment to actually think about this. What if they stole the laptop out of my car while I'm traveling? How do they even find me? Is it worth them sending a warm body and paying for airfare to follow me home if they do? How do they keep me from shooting them when they break into my house or attack me to torture me? Or my friends or family from shooting them? How do they evade law enforcement? Again, is all this worth it? And how am I worse off if I instantly give the password vs if it was plain text and they never had to let me know at all? What does encryption have to do with physical attacks? It's completely stupid.

Seriously, if you think this is correct take it to the logical conclusion: why bother wish any password beyond abc123? After all, they can "just" torture you for it right? Why bother with HTTPS? Attackers can "just" torture bank IT for the accounts anyway right? Except obviously that's not how it works.

>They could similarly ransom/blackmail you or any number of other approaches that don’t involve attempting a brute force decryption.

Again, no they generally cannot. It's impossible to be secure against an omniscient attacker with infinite resources, but IRL there is no such thing. Not even the biggest most powerful security agencies. If the cost of attacking is higher than the value of whatever it is, the security is good. Forcing attackers away from cheap, undetectable attacks into expensive, noisy attacks is what it's all about!

This comic pushes one of the most fundamental misconceptions about security, and in a doomer despair sort of way. "Why bother taking any steps, the CIA/KGB/whomever can still get you!" is not a reasonable message or argument.

Edit: another real common flaw in thinking about security is inventing fanciful threat models vs real ones, which is bad because it can mean poor allocation of limited resources. It happens a lot in certain parts of the gun community for example, egged on of course by those with things to sell: people worried about defending their homes might spend 4, even 5 figures on firearms, yet then also have a crummy door and lock that would take approximately 3.8 seconds to kick in. It would be much more effective and have higher ROI to invest much less money in basic physical security first. Decent frame/door/bolt, shatter resistant first floor windows (or film on the windows), cosmetic but spiky bush beneath them, etc won't keep out determined attackers. But most likely attackers aren't determined. They aren't after "you" they're after "someone", low hanging fruit. You don't have to be Fort Knox, you just need to be enough of a pain that police are more likely to show up in time and make it not worth it. Or enough of a pain that they go next door as cold as that is to say. It's another sort of "preoptimization is the root of all evil", focusing on outliers vs the common case.

I wouldn’t have downvoted your original comment if you had explained this to begin with.

I think what you're missing, is the comic shows a scene with two guys, and the discussion shows the guy is in the other room.

And points out how encryption is useless in such a situation. And this is just the sort of situation you end up in, if the law decides you'd better hand over your password.

You are beaten(depending upon who is the law), or physically grabbed at gunpoint, and thrown in jail.. until you hand over the password.

So the point is, encryption is useless in some circumstances.

I don't see anyone in that comic, claiming that encrypted passwords are useless. Or that someone hacking you from half way around the world, will fly to your house and kidnap you.

Instead, it's a point to think on. Are the steps being taken, useful and helpful for the planned scenario?

Really, you should level your complaints at people using this humorous comic wrong. Not the author.

>I think what you're missing, is the comic shows a scene with two guys, and the discussion shows the guy is in the other room.

There are no guys in the other room 99.999999999% of the time. And it's mostly out of scope.

>And points out how encryption is useless in such a situation

Which is wrong. You're doing a great job of illustrating the problem. Encryption is not useless, it's still doing its exact job which is forcing the threat model to shift from undetectable electronic to real world physical. Thanks to encryption, you now have knowledge and choice. You now know that they wanted the data, enough to commit crimes for it. You know they have it if you comply.

>And this is just the sort of situation you end up in, if the law decides you'd better hand over your password.

I'm interested in your statistics on times when the FBI beat American citizens with lead pipes to get them to hand over their passwords. Please do share. Then also share the big smiles on defense attorney faces afterwards during the resulting motions to suppress all evidence and subsequent 7-8 figure civil rights lawsuits. In countries that allow jail or torture for it, well first many may choose not to travel there. Or travel there only with throwaway data. Even there though encryption still serves some value, again in knowing but also opening up more degrees of freedom for how to respond. In a western country that requires decryption but does still have some respect for human rights and rule of law, you may for example be able to have your defense lawyer insist on witnesses to the access, and that the access warrant will be limited in scope ahead of time. Here encryption makes it far harder to plant evidence transparently, or conduct completely unrestricted fishing expeditions. It may allow more avenues for appealing a case. Same reason that you should never consent to just allow police to "look around" your house or car. Sure, they can beat you up and break in. But there would be consequences to that.

>So the point is, encryption is useless in some circumstances.

Again, it's not useless. Physical attacks are outside of encryption's threat model, indeed forcing attackers into physical attack is the exact point. That's vastly more expensive for attackers than non-physical attacks, and gives far more options for defenders. If your data is unencrypted, it can just be silently copied off with you none the wiser.

>Really, you should level your complaints at people using this humorous comic wrong. Not the author.

You just used this comic wrong though! Because it's a bad comic, and the message is all wrong. I think it's fairly obvious that it wasn't intended to some super subtle wrong point to promote discussion, or if it was then it's too subtle because I've never seen it cited in any way but played straight.

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Edit to reply to below:

>You are instead blathering on about all sorts of other scenarios, and failing to see that the encryption is utterly useless in that circumstance, because the point is you will give up your password, period.

As I took the time and made real effort to explain to you, encryption is not at all useless in those scenarios. There is more to encryption then merely giving up the password or not, same as there is more to a lock or safe then whether it gets broken into or not. You are wrong. And then of course having failed to address anything, you retreat into "oh it's all humor (somehow)".

Still, good to know you're the kind of person that finds torture and flagrant rights violations funny. As an American I'm not into that myself, but will acknowledge humor is highly subjective.

There are no guys in the other room 99.999999999% of the time. And it's mostly out of scope.

This is completely irrelevant. As I said, the comic is talking about the situation in that comic. Physical presence, force being used, device and person in same room.

You are instead blathering on about all sorts of other scenarios, and failing to see that the encryption is utterly useless in that circumstance, because the point is you will give up your password, period.

You fail to get this truth, and the joke, and I cannot help you sadly.

But by no means, are you making a sensible argument against the author of the comic.

Good lord man, it's a comic, it's meant to be funny. Are you German??

There's something about German culture, or maybe just growing up with the German language, that trains minds to miss some types of humour.

> why bother wish any password beyond abc123? After all, they can "just" torture you for it right? Why bother with HTTPS?

I think you're missing the point of the comic. It isn't arguing against basic defense; it's the lengths necessary in "the crypto nerd's imagination" that it's calling out

>it's the lengths necessary in "the crypto nerd's imagination" that it's calling out

As well as being a classic example of a strawman, how is the "crypto nerd" wrong? Encryption cipher in these cases is perfectly transparent to the user, there is zero advantage in using something broken vs something secure. We've long, long ago passed the point where hardware symmetric encryption couldn't keep up with the speed of storage. An end user will observe no in-use difference between AES256 and ROT-13. The "crypto nerd" correctly focused on the real threat profiles. How do you supposed the percentage of people facing

>beat with lead pipe

compares with

>someone stole a phone or notebook off a bar table or from a car for drug money, if it's unencrypted maybe someone takes a shot at it, if it's not it instantly gets wiped and sold, or if it has some sort of protection against that it gets chop shop'd and the parts sold

? Which one of these makes sense to focus on? And even in the first case, how do you imagine someone is worse off spilling the password immediately with blubbering apoligies once the lead pipe comes out, vs if they never needed to be asked at all?

> Encryption cipher in these cases is perfectly transparent to the user

It's not the specific cipher that it's making fun of, but the "let's build a $x supercomputer to crack it." Honestly, half of the things you say in your edit/replies are really making the same point.

But maybe I'm wrong and "everything" about the comic is actually stupid, wrong, etc. Even so, I'm not going to get too upset about it

I think you are reading a lot into a two panel comic that isn't really there. the punchline is simply that the nerd didn't understand their threat model in two ways: 1) someone who would consider spending a million dollars to decrypt your hard drive probably would consider physical attacks as well, and 2) no one is likely to invest that amount of resources into accessing a random nerd's hard drive in the first place.

I read the overall message as being the flip side of what you say here:

> If the cost of attacking is higher than the value of whatever it is, the security is good.

if the effort/resources spent on defense is greater than the value of the thing being defended, it is a waste. full disk encryption was not commonly used by consumers when the comic was published in 2009, and would have come with a significant performance penalty on laptop hardware of the era. the feature wasn't even included in vista home SKUs. it probably wasn't a worthwhile tradeoff for this hypothetical nerd.

I think you're reading things into the comic that I'd argue are not there:

Nowhere is Randall saying that the crowbar is the only or the most likely attack scenario to worry about.

He's simply mentioning that it's there and worth keeping in mind, especially when going overboard with other security measures not appropriate in the threat model.

Double check you didn't get redirected to the wrong comic. The one the parent commented is absolutely correct.

> Obligatory: that comic is one of the few (only?) times Mr Munroe got a topic completely, absolutely and utterly wrong and made a really, really bad comic.

Not few, it's pretentious most of the times. I am with you on the criticism, XKCD is the loud, smart-ass kid in the room that everyone thinks is smart because he's using big words.

My understanding of this XKCD:

It’s a subtle yet poignant reminder that our inclination, as tech-savvy individuals, is often to envision sophisticated technical exploits when considering hacking scenarios. However, the stark reality is that, in the vast majority of cases, both individuals and organizations fall prey to breaches not through intricate code manipulation, but rather via the art of social engineering. (beating the sh*t out of someone can be thought as an extreme form of social eng.) This comic underscores the importance of understanding and mitigating the very human vulnerabilities that persist at the heart of cybersecurity.