Give hackers your data, says former RSA man

Former RSA chief scientist Ari Juels has outlined a cunning way to foil crackers: let them think they’ve busted into a system and then give them fake data to play with.

The idea is not entirely novel because Juels last year proposed a scheme he called “Honeywords” in this paper, co-authored with RSA founder Ronald Rivest. Honeywords is a kind of “security by obscurity”, but in a good way: instead of an attacker stealing a table that has one password per user, the password table has the real password as well as a bunch of fakes – the “honeywords” – for each user.