Where is the real security problem?

Ian Grigg: Ladies and Gentlemen, there you have it. The Internet Threat Model (ITM), in a nutshell.

It's a strong model: the end nodes are secure and the middle is not. It's clean, it's simple, and we just happen to have a solution for it.

Problem is, it's also wrong. The end systems are not secure, and the comms in the middle is actually remarkably safe.

(Whoa! Did he say that?) Yep, I surely did: the systems are insecure, and, the wire is safe. [...]

...in practice, we can conclude, nobody much listens to our traffic. Really, so close to nobody that nobody in reality worries about it.

But, every sumbitch is trying to hack into our machine, everyone has a virus scanner, a firewall,
etc etc. I'm sure we've all shared that weird feeling when we install a new firewall that notifies when your machine is being port scanned?
A new machine can be put on a totally new IP, and almost immediately, ports are being scanned....