The Unreasonable Ineffectiveness of Security Engineering: An Overview

Abstract

In his 1960 essay, EugeneWigner raised the question of ”the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in natural sciences” [32]. After several decades of security research, we are tempted to ask the opposite question: Are we not unreasonably ineffective? Why are we not more secure from all the security technologies? I sketch a conceptual landscape of security that may provide some answers, on the background of ever increasing dynamics and pervasiveness of software and computation.