security through obscurity

[derek at ihtfp.com (Derek Atkins)]

Dan Geer <geer at world.std.com> writes:

> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37648-2004Feb12.html

I have to wonder where they get the 40GB number -- that just doesn't
make sense to me.  Honestly I think they are off my an order of
magnitude somewhere.

Let's assume they are correct in the estimation of 40 million lines of
code.  Let's further assume that each line is fully 80 characters
long.  40MM * 80 == 3.2E9 which is just over 3GB of storage (there's
that order of magnitude).  Considering source code compresses fairly
easily, I can certainly imagine a compression ratio of 5:1 to get down
to a CD-rom sized 650MB.

So this could very well be the full source code in a compressed
tarfile or a zipfile.

> versus
>
> http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/licensing/getsource.mspx

Heh.

> --dan

-derek

-- 
       Derek Atkins                 617-623-3745
       derek at ihtfp.com             www.ihtfp.com
       Computer and Internet Security Consultant