The solution to any problem is found in the proper definition of the problem
— Doug Hale
Everything in software changes. The requirements change. The design changes. The business changes. The technology changes. The team changes. The team members change. The problem isn’t change, because change is going to happen; the problem, rather, is our inability to cope with change
— Kent Beck
Creativity has more to do with interaction that brilliance — CTO
“Security systems are never value-neutral; they move power in varying degrees to one set of players from another.” — Bruce Schneier, Beyond Fear p. 35
“People exaggerate spectacular but rare risks and downplay common risks”. — Bruce Schneier, Beyond Fear p. 26
“Technology is generally an enabler, allowing people to do things. Security is the opposite: It tries to prevent something… That’s why technology doesn’t work in security the way it does elsewhere, and why an overreliance on technology often leads to bad security, or even to the opposite of security.” — Bruce Schneier, Beyond Fear p. 13 Is your client-server software secure? You may be surprised to find that even mature software, sporting the use of standard encryption, could be putting your mission-critical data at risk. Why is that? It has to do with economics and the lifecycle of software. Here are the stages. Prototype. No one cares about the security of the client-server communication. First release. Althought the system (likely little more than an improved prototype) has been shipped, it may not be usable, and if it is, it lacks mission-critical features. Security is low on the priority list. If encryption and authentication were implemented, it is most likely minimal, brittle and insufficient. If the security is robust, the product is not functional and likely never will be because the ISV will go out of business. Second or third release. If the ISV has survived long enough to release a second or third version, customers likely demanded the use of standard encryption. In the old days (the 1990s), this means the ISV would have switched from XOR “encryption” to DES or 3DES. These days, standard encryption probably means use of SSL/TLS without certificate checks. Note that customers probably won’t ask about the security of the authentication mechanisms. Unfortunately, use of a standard encryption algorithm doesn’t mean communication is secure. Software is likely to be vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks and have authentication bugs. The customer isn’t likely to know this, and neither is the ISV. If the ISV does know, they won’t fix the problems. This shouldn’t be surprising — the risk tolerance is different for the ISV versus their customers. The software vendor isn’t the one that is going to suffer losses due to information disclosure or breach of integrity. At this stage, customers usually apply more pressure to implement new features than to focus on security. Of course, this is based on ignorance of the actual situation. The vendor isn’t likely to want to pay the price to improve security… unless the customer knows and applies pressure to get it fixed. Eventually, a security-conscious customer (i.e. a financial institution or a government) hires someone to evaluate the software, and they start asking hard questions of the ISV. Most of the ISV’s software engineers won’t know the answers because the security mechanism is transparent to their daily work — it stays out of sight, and out of mind. Eventually, people figure out that the encryption is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks or authentication bugs. At first, customers may be reluctant to believe that the security holes are serious, and then they will panic. They will apply pressure to the ISV to get it fixed.
Take-away points:
Tim Bray explains what is to like about the Ruby programming language:
I’ll jump to the conclusion first. For people like me, who are proficient in Perl and Java, Ruby is remarkably, perhaps irresistibly, attractive. Over the last week I’ve got an unreasonable amount of work done in a ridiculously short period of time, with lots of interruptions, in a language I previously didn’t know. It’s intuitive enough that I’ve often found myself guessing at a syntax or a method or a usage and getting it right first time.
Maybe the single biggest advantage is readability. Once you’ve got over the hump of the block/yield idiom, I find that a chunk of Ruby code shouts its meaning out louder and clearer than any other language. Anything that increases maintainability is a pearl beyond price.
I’ve been programming in C and Java for a quarter-century and I find Ruby easier to read, only a week in. Of course, a language’s culture is often more important than all that technical crap. I’ve found the ruby-talk mailing list to be a fount of wisdom and friendly to ignorant newbies too.
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/07/24/Ruby
Follow the link to find out “What’s Lame” about Ruby.
Having worked for some time as a software engineer in the enterprise security As many are aware, there is “consolidation” going on in the security market. Not so.
In any big corporation or software company, there are constant power plays So, we have two best of breed products: Overdog and Underdog. Underdog is Enter Big Fish — a.k.a. Consolidator. Consolidator buys Overdog, and a few Whenever there is a consolidation, talented people get fired, and their What can you expect from Software Consolidators? Mediocre solutions. Look
A coworker made these assertions about security. I think they’re worth repeating:
One of my past professors, Phil Windley, posted some principles of reputation:
Here’s a thought provoking article about the problems of large-scale data mining by
“Data-mining is complicated, and the more data you are mining, the more
“Furthermore, gathering large amounts of data is inherently dangerous.
“Technology can be a very powerful tool, but what it can’t do is replace
Crash-only software: More than meets the eye Properly implemented, crash-only software produces higher quality, more
breakfast discussion, Phil Windley
Security quotes
Stages of Security in the life of computer software
Tim Bray tells us what’s awesome about Ruby
Best of Breed, or Best of Mediocrity?
software world, I know that customers (enterprises) look for “best of breed”
software. For a large company customer, this usually means that a software
solution distinguishes itself in some way that makes it work well in their
environment. Often, this translates to reliability, cross-platform support,
person-to-person support and the ability to function beyond what is advertised.
Big fish are swallowing smaller fish, and it’s lucrative, in the short term,
for everyone except customers. Supposedly, the consolidation means that two
separate products can be “integrated”, or unified. Never mind the previous
competitive relationship that may have existed between the product teams and
their management. For some reason, people seem to think that competition
evaporates and that the two product teams will happily work together to build
the next generation “Best of Breed” software solution.
being made. You could call this “decision making”, and if you have uncommonly
good leaders, you might even say good decisions are being made.
Unfortunately, it is human nature for most people to misuse and abuse positions
of power. Instead of making product decisions that are best for their merged
customer base, they make decisions that keep themselves in a position of power.
easier to manage, but isn’t as complete in its offerings. Overdog is more
complete, but is more expensive to deploy and manage. Overdog has the advantage
of being used in Fortune 500 companies. Underdog, on the other hand, is trying
to break into that market space.
years later, buys Underdog. We take two products, both “Best of Breed” in
different ways, and expect to see them merged together to make something “next
generation” — better, faster, stronger, and easier to use.
creative ideas and abilities are lost. Product integration never happens as
easily as anyone would like to believe (if it happens at all). And in the end, customers end up with a
product that we can best label as “Best of Mediocrity”. Consolidation means
that customers lose their “Best of Breed” solutions.
elsewhere for excellence.The purpose of security…
Principles of Reputation
Is Data Mining Fools Gold?
governments. It’s written by a person living in the UK.
false positives your software will throw up. If you act upon a false
positive for a motoring offence, it’s an inconvenience for the motorist,
but for an alleged case of child abuse, it can rip the family apart and
ruin the child’s life.”
Whatever information governments find interesting will also draw the
attention of criminals. Databases can be hard to keep secure, and it’s
not necessarily hackers that we should be worried about, but
unauthorised access by employees of the agencies that use these
databases. Equally, the more data you have, the more difficult it is to
maintain accuracy. In 2000, an audit of the Police National Computer
found that 86% of records contained errors, 85% of those errors were
serious, and some were libellous.”
real human beings or traditional investigative work. Designed badly or
used poorly, databases are the technological equivalent of fools gold.”Article: Crash-only software
by Valerie Henson July 12, 2006:
http://lwn.net/Articles/191059/
reliable code; poorly understood it results in lazy programming. Probably
the most common misconception is the idea that writing crash-only software
is that it allows you to take shortcuts when writing and designing your
code. Wake up, Sleeping Beauty, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
But you can get a more reliable, easier to debug system if you rigorously
apply the principles of crash-only design.