Pushing The Antithesis - Part 2 - Destroying Philosphical Fortresses

The second part of the series has to do with taking down philosophical fortresses. Although we have not covered chapter 3 on worldviews you may consider this prep work as a number of principles will nicely lead into the next series.
Try to understand why the unbelieving mind is hostile to the Christian worldview; understand why no one can be neutral and still remain philosophically consistent; what is meant by the "noetic" effects of sin.

The main points to be observed from this chapter are:

• Factually we must recognize that the unbeliever is not neutral.
• Morally, we must understand that the believer should not be neutral.
• Any claim to neutrality is a pretense, and it is philosophically impossible.
• "Noetic" is derived from the Greek word, nous, which means "mind".
• This is one aspect of the doctrine of "total depravity", which declares that the fall reaches deep down into a man's very being, even to his mind, and his reasoning faculties.
• The world and the universe do not operate randomly by blind chance or under their own inherent power.
• In fact, you will even give account for every "idle word" that you speak (Matt 12:36).
• None of your words is neutral; each one is subject to God's evaluative judgement.
• We are not saying unbelievers "know nothing." We are saying that they do not know anything "truly," because they do not recognize the most fundamental reality: All facts are God-created facts, not brute facts.

Recommended Reading

Flashing, Sarah J., "The Myth of Secular Neutrality: Unbiased Bioethics?"
Kruger, Michael J., "The Sufficiency of Scripture in Apologetics"
Oliphant, Scott, "The Noetic Effects of Sin"

Woodward, Thomas E., "Staring Down Darwinism: A Book Review"

Pushing the Antithesis - Part 1: The Myth of Neutrality

I had acquired through a friend on Twitter, a copy of Greg Bahnsen's, "Pushing the Antithesis". As such I have decided to publish a blog post for each chapter. This is the first of twelve blog posts. Each post will consist of some key bullet points along with some recommend reading links where available.
As the chapter title suggests, Dr. Bahnsen puts to bed the supposed "neutrality" that anyone has let along the Christian.

The main points to be observed from this chapter are:

• This "neutral" approach is neither biblical nor effective.
• Christians must not set aside their faith commitment even temporarily in an attempt to approach the unbeliever on "neutral ground".
• If you don't start with God as your basic assumption, you can't prove anything./
• The assumption of God's existence required to all reasoning.
• Evolution theory is taken for granted throughout the college curriculum, just as it is in all aspects of modern though and experience.
• Modern education is effectively subliminal advertising for atheism.
• The university and the media supposedly encourage neutrality by urging tolerance of all views.
• But we are all aware that the Christian view is seldom given equal tolerance.
• The Christian who strives for neutrality unwittingly endorses assumptions which are hostile to his faith.
• Simply put, you cannot adopt a position of neutrality toward God if you are to remain faithful to Christ.
• The Bible claims infallible and obligatory authority which demands commitment to its truth claims.
• Such neutrality actually amounts to skepticism regarding the existence of God and the authority of His Word.
• He (Satan) suggested that she must remain neutral in order to decide who was right, God or Satan. She did not accept God's word as authoritative and conclusive, but as a true neutralist, determined for herself which option to take. (Gen 3:4-6)
• Robert South (1634-1716) said, "He who would fight the devil with his own weapons, must not wonder if he finds himself over matched."
• Van Til - "there simply is no presupposition-free and neutral way to approach reasoning."
• A true biblical apologetic does not set aside Christ from our hearts, but sets apart Christ in our hearts.

Recommended Reading

Bahnsen, Greg L., Always Ready: Directions for Defending the Faith
Demar, Gary, Thinking Straight in a Crooked World: A Christian Defense Manual

Gentry, Kenneth L., Jr., Defending the Faith: An Introduction to Biblical Apologetics

Security Links for March 2016

Here are some new security-related (for the most part ;) links from the month of March 2016:

• Bitcoin Wisdom - Trading-type Terminal for Bitcoin - https://bitcoinwisdom.com/ 
• Zone Transfer Tutorial - https://digi.ninja/projects/zonetransferme.php 
• Debian Hardening Wiki - https://wiki.debian.org/Hardening 
• Standard Password Manager for UNIX - https://www.passwordstore.org/ 
• Is your Browser safe against tracking? - https://panopticlick.eff.org 
• Have I been Pwned? - https://haveibeenpwned.com/ 
• CryptoPals -Cool CTF for Crypto - http://cryptopals.com/ 
• Nice Tool to Tell What CMS A Site is Running - https://whatcms.org/ 
• A simple SSL/TLS proxy with mutual authentication for securing non-TLS services - https://github.com/square/ghostunnel 
• Find out if a site is down globally - http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ 
• DNS Zone Transfer Tool - https://github.com/stryngs/axfr-tools 
• Nice Coding Guide for N00bs - http://download-mirror.savannah.gnu.org/releases/pgubook/ProgrammingGroundUp-1-0-booksize.pdf 
• Ransomware seems to be popular these days. Here's a site that tracks the variants - https://ransomwaretracker.abuse.ch/tracker/ 
• Need I say more? - http://www.routerpwn.com/

Security Links for February 2016

• Security links for February 2016. Application Security Learning Resources - https://github.com/paragonie/awesome-appsec#application-security-learning-resources
• A Dead Simple TCP Intercepting Proxy Tool Set - https://www.praetorian.com/blog/trudy-a-dead-simple-tcp-intercepting-proxy-mitm-vm
• Let's Encrypt Audit - https://community.letsencrypt.org/t/independent-audits-of-lets-encrypt-finished/6518
• Introducing the Keybase filesystem - Sounds like a sane approach to encrypting data at rest - https://keybase.io/docs/kbfs
• Securely Hash Passwords - https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/211/how-to-securely-hash-passwords
• An Interesting Online Scanner - https://www.censys.io/
• Another Attempt at Creating a Secure Linux Distro - https://www.parabola.nu/
• An open-source network simulator/emulator hybrid (Tor & Bitcoin) - https://shadow.github.io/
• For Encrypting/Decrypting Data on the Fly - https://encipher.it/
• Red Team Field Manual - http://www.amazon.com/Rtfm-Red-Team-Field-Manual/dp/1494295504/ref=pd_bxgy_14_3?ie=UTF8&refRID=19V4X7X4WW7215V446N7
• Decentralized DNS 
for Blockchain Applications - https://blockstack.org/
• Github Bounty Program - https://bounty.github.com/index.html#open-bounties
• Send An Urgent Message to a Friend When your in Trouble (i.e. Feds are knocking at your door) - http://www.snapmailemergency.com/
• Get your cheap exploits here - http://cheapbugs.net/#home

Educating Youth for Cyber Security Careers

This past week I attended the Northeast Ohio Cyberconsortium conference sponsored by a number of entities in the Cleveland,Oh area. The goal of the conference was to stimulate a collaborative effort around building up and sharing information around Cyber Security as it relates to the North East Ohio area. One of the main talks was about the skills shortage in Information Security and what should be done to increase the talent pool. The proposition(they loved throwing this word around) offered was to build educational programs in the school systems around Cyber Security at as early of an age as possible. I think the NSA said that they get the gifted ones as early as 3rd grade and for security we should consider preschool. The goal is an excellent ones, but the reductionist attitude offered presents a number of challenges. The one problem is that you simply cannot teach Information Security as an isolated discipline. There are a number of prerequisites that are necessary before you can even start to teach kids security. To name a few:

Computer Architecture – X86/X64/ARM

Operating Systems – UNIX/Windows/OSX/Android/IOS

Programming – Powershell/Python/Perl/Bash

Networking – TCP/IP, OSI, Ethernet, Wifi

These are all complex domains by themselves and then add on to that the various security principles that need to be applied and you can see it’s not as cut and dry as you may think. Then there are the ethical challenges in that to really understand how to secure things is you have to understand how to break things. This will no doubt create dilemmas with existing school policy and what the kids can currently do with school equipment. So I think what really needs to happen to make this achievable is a complete rewrite of existing educational plans. I think a structure more like college should be implemented where kids that are interested in a given domain like Cyber Security can elect to make it their ‘major’ and by doing so a specific roadmap would be produced for their educational career. The other thing to keep in mind is not all kids will be interested in such a field nor have an aptitude as you need to think about problems in a very detailed and logical way and not everyone’s brain is wired this way.

Let’s Encrypt Talk @ Debconf15

At this years Debconf15, a nice overview of the Let’s Encrypt project was given that you can view here. It’s a nice exposition as to the current broken state of CA’s and the projects plan to solve them. Let’s Encrypt is going to be making free certificates available in the next month or so. Will this be a game changer for commercial CA’s that make their profit off of selling certificates? Probably not in the short term and a large part of the answer will depend upon adoption and getting the Root & Issuing CA’s added to the trusted browser stores.

Security Implementations & Scaling

I have been doing Information Security for a decade and a half and there is a disturbing pattern that still to this day has not abated. That pattern involves more of a philosophy than the actual scaling you would need to for designing a security solution for an organization. The scaling law I'm talking about is one that is usually recognized too late in the implementation process, namely the post-production phase of a project. What I'm referring to is the amount of output you have to deal with that is a result of implementing a security solution without considering the resources necessary to manage and the resulting business process that need to accommodate this reality. One of the best use cases that demonstrates this phenomena is around the implementation of a Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solution for an enterprise. A typical DLP solution usually involves three main areas:

• Data in Motion - Data that traverses the network

 

• Data at Rest - Data that is stored on disk

 

• Endpoint Data - Data that typically is read and written to removable media

  You have a number of approaches you could take. The most reasonable would be to focus on one of the three areas that consider was vital and to scale the scope of the inspections to very specific set of criteria. Is this how most DLP deployments go? No, instead usually all three are turned on at the same time and there is no scaling back of the criteria. The result; more incidents and false-positives than fleas at the Westminster Canine convention. Once this scenario is encountered you end up scaling back your efforts and loss at least 3 months of progress. So do yourself a favor when implementing a security solution and understand what our outputs are before they are produced.