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Michal Zalewski On Security's Broken Promises 125

Lipton-Arena writes "In a thought-provoking guest editorial on ZDNet, Google security guru Michal Zalewski laments the IT security industry's broken promises and argues that little has been done over the years to improve the situation. From the article: 'We have in essence completely failed to come up with even the most rudimentary, usable frameworks for understanding and assessing the security of modern software; and spare for several brilliant treatises and limited-scale experiments, we do not even have any real-world success stories to share. The focus is almost exclusively on reactive, secondary security measures: vulnerability management, malware and attack detection, sandboxing, and so forth; and perhaps on selectively pointing out flaws in somebody else's code. The frustrating, jealously guarded secret is that when it comes to actually enabling others to develop secure systems, we deliver far less value than could be expected.'"
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Michal Zalewski On Security's Broken Promises

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  • by maxwell demon ( 590494 ) on Friday May 21, 2010 @04:10PM (#32298054) Journal

    I think normal bullets are sufficient for that. Unless some of the users are wizards, of course.

  • by syousef ( 465911 ) on Friday May 21, 2010 @04:41PM (#32298554) Journal

    Do you actually think that all IT and PC security companies have a giant cartel going, where they all secretly agree to suck?

    They are called security conferences and 'best practice; documents

    Seriously? If there were some magic bullet, the temptation for one cartel member to make a giant pile of cash on it would be overwhelming.

    They appear to have found the magic bullet. it is called "the principle of least privellege". Basically they take away your ability to do anything but log on. Then when you shout loudly enough that you can no longer do your job, they make you fill out so much paperwork that you'll never want to ask for access again. Finally when you have just enough access to do enough of your job that you don't get fired (ineffectively and poorly) they continue to make you justify the access you gained in endless meetings, emails, reports etc.
     

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