BSD tty security, part 3: How to Fix It

[kevin lyda]

In article <21553:May1020:06:0791 at kramden.acf.nyu.edu> brnstnd at 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.