I was wandering around the other day thinking to myself, how secure are things in my daily life.  How do my expectations of security match the reality?

I started with my house.  How secure is my house?  Well, there are 'locks' on all the doors and windows.  Certainly that makes it secure.  And then of course there's the garage door, that impenetrable mass of metal and wood.  Next to having a moat, what could be more secure than that.

So, I go off to work each day, and leave my house with a full sense of security.  I haven't lost any sleep yet.

I park my car in the 'secure' parking lots of Microsoft.  Surely they're secure because I have a green tag hanging from my mirror that the constantly surveiling security services are looking for.  Anyone caught without one of these things will surely be towed from the premises and their car detonated before it can do any damage to any of our buildings.  That green tag leaves me with a strong sense of security, so I happily go into the building, using my secure smart card (no tail gating), and I happily unlock my secure office knowing that my secured laptop is password protected with the strongest password I can think of, at least until I have to reset my password again.

My whole life is one secure experience, and I can sleep at night...

Well, my house is only secure from the casual thief.  Anyone can break a window, and they can do it from the back yard where they won't be noticed from the street.  Sorry to say, the alarm system has not been operational since I moved in since it didn't seem worth the monthly charges.  Then there's my garage.  It's protected by the super secure garage door opener system.  The wonder here is that there are universal remotes that you can buy at any hardware store.  To break into any garage, it just needs to cycle through a few codes until it finds the one that unlocks your garage, and you're in.

But surely my house is secure because there's a fire door between the garage and the rest of the house.  Yah, and all my tools are in the garage, so a quick job with the saws all and you're in.  Bring a van into the garage, load it up in privacy, and simply drive away.  Sure, this requires you to buy a universal remote, and that will set you back $30, but think of all the loot you'll gain.  Even at that, how secure is the remote in my car?  Well, forget the lock, just break the window and reach in a grab it.  You'll be gone before anyone notices.  My car is sitting in the parking lot at Safeway, you can find it easily, it's the one with the green tag hanging from the mirror.  Just follow me over, and you're assured you'll have at least an hour to clear me out.

Speaking of my car, we have security tags to make Microsoft secure.  Well, that is at least from those who are do gooders.  The funny thing is, when you drive under one of the buildings, you'll notice vans parked down there with a “sticker” in their back window that reads “Microsoft Mail Parking Permit” or something lame like that.  It's printed on the construction paper like my daugheter uses for her crafts.  Nothing fancy, and you can print it up yourself on any printer.  Now, color me skeptical, but aren't big cargo vans without windows the things that we're supposed to be afraid of these days?  Good thing our parking structures are secured against them.  Meanwhile, if you don't display the green sticker on your Miata, you will be dealt with most severely.  Oh yah, those stickers are just about as hard to print as the mail delivery van 'permits'.

At least my office is secure.  I can lock it any time and prevent my fellow trusted employees from getting at all my precious stuff.  Turns out, the janitorial staff, which I've never interviewed nor met, has a key to my office and can come in any time, especially on weekends when noone's around, and clean me out.  Thank goodness I'm secured against my fellow trusted employees though.

But, surely the building is secure because I need a card key to get in, and there's no tail gating.  Security has a strange way of changing habits.  It used to be that I had to have my ID card on me all the time, but not prominently displayed.  That was cool, I kept it in my wallet, and I always knew where it was.  I just had to slide my back side next to the reader to get into the building.  In our infinite wisdom and distrust of fellow employees, we now have to display our badges at all times so that we can check each other and sternly say “where's your badge” when we meet a stranger who's trying to tailgate into the building.  Never mind that the badge may be expired, that's another story.

So, I've been socially engineered.  The badge is no longer in my wallet, but on one of those fobs that hang from your belt loop.  I'm getting old, so I have to keep it in a safe place, or I'll forget it.  Where better than my car?  I take my car to work, so it's always in there.  What a brilliant idea.  So, now, if you want into the building, you'll have to go through my super secure car, which has an alarm and tempered glass on the windows.

I sleep easy at night because of all the highly secure measures that protect me.  The other day though, something scared me silly.  I mean this rocked the very foundations of my sense of security.  I've discovered the beauties of installable network and file system filters.  If you want something to keep you up at night, that's some serious scary stuff.  But, that's another story.