He's misdirecting people. Sure this is good advice. The problem is they only protect upper layers of the stack. NSA TAO hits the lower ones, too. Some NSA tooling even attacks in ways that require TEMPEST-style shielding. An old enumeration of issues I put together shows more of the places they're hitting plus assurance activities that stopped their hackers in the past:
http://pastebin.com/y3PufJ0V
Suffice it to say, the TAO is going to breach most of what people use. What people in high-assurance security usually did was a combination of airgaps, embedded hardware, micro/separation kernels, things like serial ports to avoid DMA risk, and so on. You have to get all the attack surface out of the equation. Then, you make the TCB simple and strong for the rest.
It's more work than most will do. It also counters the mainstream favorites like Linux/BSD, at least usual usage. So, uptake of high-security methods stayed low enough for TAO to have an easy job. Snowden leaks haven't changed that: economic and social factors remain for proprietary and FOSS. So, follow this advice or not, they'll still probably get in because root problems are still there. Might stop others, though.
http://pastebin.com/y3PufJ0V
Suffice it to say, the TAO is going to breach most of what people use. What people in high-assurance security usually did was a combination of airgaps, embedded hardware, micro/separation kernels, things like serial ports to avoid DMA risk, and so on. You have to get all the attack surface out of the equation. Then, you make the TCB simple and strong for the rest.
It's more work than most will do. It also counters the mainstream favorites like Linux/BSD, at least usual usage. So, uptake of high-security methods stayed low enough for TAO to have an easy job. Snowden leaks haven't changed that: economic and social factors remain for proprietary and FOSS. So, follow this advice or not, they'll still probably get in because root problems are still there. Might stop others, though.