What does security through obscurity mean?

Definitions for security through obscurity
se·cu·ri·ty through ob·scu·ri·ty

This dictionary definitions page includes all the possible meanings, example usage and translations of the word security through obscurity.

Wiktionary

  1. security through obscuritynoun

    Relying on a potential attacker's lack of knowledge as a means of security.

Wikipedia

  1. Security through obscurity

    Security through obscurity (or security by obscurity) is the reliance in security engineering on design or implementation secrecy as the main method of providing security to a system or component.

Wikidata

  1. Security through obscurity

    Security through obscurity is a pejorative referring to a principle in security engineering, which attempts to use secrecy of design or implementation to provide security. A system relying on security through obscurity may have theoretical or actual security vulnerabilities, but its owners or designers believe that if the flaws are not known, then attackers will be unlikely to find them. A system may use security through obscurity as a defense in depth measure; while all known security vulnerabilities would be mitigated through other measures, public disclosure of products and versions in use makes them early targets for newly discovered vulnerabilities in those products and versions. An attacker's first step is usually information gathering; this step is delayed by security through obscurity. The technique stands in contrast with security by design and open security, although many real-world projects include elements of all strategies. Security through obscurity has never achieved engineering acceptance as an approach to securing a system, as it contradicts the principle of "keeping it simple". The United States National Institute of Standards and Technology specifically recommends against security through obscurity in more than one document. Quoting from one, "System security should not depend on the secrecy of the implementation or its components."

The New Hacker's Dictionary

  1. security through obscurity

    (alt.: security by obscurity) A term applied by hackers to most OS vendors' favorite way of coping with security holes — namely, ignoring them, documenting neither any known holes nor the underlying security algorithms, trusting that nobody will find out about them and that people who do find out about them won't exploit them. This “strategy” never works for long and occasionally sets the world up for debacles like the RTM worm of 1988 (see Great Worm), but once the brief moments of panic created by such events subside most vendors are all too willing to turn over and go back to sleep. After all, actually fixing the bugs would siphon off the resources needed to implement the next user-interface frill on marketing's wish list — and besides, if they started fixing security bugs customers might begin to expect it and imagine that their warranties of merchantability gave them some sort of right to a system with fewer holes in it than a shotgunned Swiss cheese, and then where would we be?Historical note: There are conflicting stories about the origin of this term. It has been claimed that it was first used in the Usenet newsgroup comp.sys.apollo during a campaign to get HP/Apollo to fix security problems in its Unix-clone Aegis/DomainOS (they didn't change a thing). ITS fans, on the other hand, say it was coined years earlier in opposition to the incredibly paranoid Multics people down the hall, for whom security was everything. In the ITS culture it referred to (1) the fact that by the time a tourist figured out how to make trouble he'd generally gotten over the urge to make it, because he felt part of the community; and (2) (self-mockingly) the poor coverage of the documentation and obscurity of many commands. One instance of deliberate security through obscurity is recorded; the command to allow patching the running ITS system (escape escape control-R) echoed as $$^D. If you actually typed alt alt ^D, that set a flag that would prevent patching the system even if you later got it right.

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Numerology

  1. Chaldean Numerology

    The numerical value of security through obscurity in Chaldean Numerology is: 5

  2. Pythagorean Numerology

    The numerical value of security through obscurity in Pythagorean Numerology is: 7


Translations for security through obscurity

From our Multilingual Translation Dictionary

  • securitatis per obscurumLatin

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"security through obscurity." Definitions.net. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 19 Mar. 2024. <https://www.definitions.net/definition/security+through+obscurity>.

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    an outward bevel around a door or window that makes it seem larger
    A splay
    B lank
    C usurious
    D pecuniary

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