Xref: utzoo comp.unix.wizards:25543 alt.security:2515 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!udel!haven.umd.edu!purdue!sample.eng.ohio-state.edu!cis.ohio-state.edu!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!csn!ub!lyda From: lyda@acsu.buffalo.edu (kevin lyda) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards,alt.security Subject: Re: BSD tty security, part 3: How to Fix It Message-ID: <76022@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> Date: 11 May 91 06:26:42 GMT References: <19249@rpp386.cactus.org> <28949:May620:55:5391@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <19253@rpp386.cactus.org> <21553:May1020:06:0791@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> Sender: news@acsu.Buffalo.EDU Followup-To: comp.unix.wizards Organization: State University of New York at Buffalo/Comp Sci Lines: 106 In article <21553:May1020:06:0791@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes: >Those of you who've been shouting religious stupidities >about how you absolutely need to see break code to be convinced that my >fixes work---can you see the difference now between a proof of security >by logic and a ``proof'' of security by testing? (I will address this >point in detail in a coming message.) good point.... :) a file that one of my professors was kind enough to distribute... sadly, none of these proofs receive credit... HOW TO PROVE IT proof by example: The author gives only the case n = 2 and suggests that it contains most of the ideas of the general proof. proof by intimidation: 'Trivial'. proof by vigorous handwaving: Works well in a classroom or seminar setting. proof by cumbersome notation: Best done with access to at least four alphabets and special symbols. proof by exhaustion: An issue or two of a journal devoted to your proof is useful. proof by omission: 'The reader may easily supply the details' 'The other 253 cases are analogous' '...' proof by obfuscation: A long plotless sequence of true and/or meaningless syntactically related statements. proof by wishful citation: The author cites the negation, converse, or generalization of a theorem from the literature to support his claims. proof by funding: How could three different government agencies be wrong? proof by eminent authority: 'I saw Karp in the elevator and he said it was probably NP- complete.' proof by personal communication: 'Eight-dimensional colored cycle stripping is NP-complete [Karp, personal communication].' proof by reduction to the wrong problem: 'To see that infinite-dimensional colored cycle stripping is decidable, we reduce it to the halting problem.' proof by reference to inaccessible literature: The author cites a simple corollary of a theorem to be found in a privately circulated memoir of the Slovenian Philological Society, 1883. proof by importance: A large body of useful consequences all follow from the proposition in question. proof by accumulated evidence: Long and diligent search has not revealed a counterexample. proof by cosmology: The negation of the proposition is unimaginable or meaningless. Popular for proofs of the existence of God. proof by mutual reference: In reference A, Theorem 5 is said to follow from Theorem 3 in reference B, which is shown to follow from Corollary 6.2 in reference C, which is an easy consequence of Theorem 5 in reference A. proof by metaproof: A method is given to construct the desired proof. The correctness of the method is proved by any of these techniques. proof by picture: A more convincing form of proof by example. Combines well with proof by omission. proof by vehement assertion: It is useful to have some kind of authority relation to the audience. proof by ghost reference: Nothing even remotely resembling the cited theorem appears in the reference given. proof by forward reference: Reference is usually to a forthcoming paper of the author, which is often not as forthcoming as at first. proof by semantic shift: Some of the standard but inconvenient definitions are changed for the statement of the result. proof by appeal to intuition: Cloud-shaped drawings frequently help here.