A classic. Bell's Looking Back Addendum [1] also traces the beginning of high assurance security market (their solution) and how DOD/NSA totally killed it. I specialized in extending such high assurance systems or approaches to handle modern problems. That market is gone, though, thanks to DOD/NSA policies to use low assurance systems and even pushing them. Post-Snowden, it's fair to wonder if it was mismanagement or intentional that they marketed low assurance alternatives (eg DTW, MDDS) to the kinds of OS's and guards they couldn't beat with 2-5 years of pentesting (esp Boeing SNS Server).<p>Yet, I think I can say we all focused too much on the OS and software security side of things despite what we accomplished. As Brian Snow noted, we're really just trying to implement forms of isolation on machines designed for pervasive sharing (read: insecurity). It's why I counterpointed Geer here [2] saying our software security crisis isn't inevitable: we just need to use hardware and tools that make secure software easier to write. I gave examples from the past of many security-improving features systems had, including immunity to code injection via app attack. Fortunately, at least a few groups (esp DARPA/NSF sponsored) took notice and are working on such architectures today.<p>[1] <a href="http://lukemuehlhauser.com/wp-content/uploads/Bell-Looking-Back-Addendum.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://lukemuehlhauser.com/wp-content/uploads/Bell-Looking-B...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/04/dan_geer_on_hea.html#c5598568" rel="nofollow">https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/04/dan_geer_on_h...</a>
The youngest references are from 1998, so I'm guessing this was written by 2000, before the Very Bad Indeed 9/11 incidents. Also, it doesn't mention terrorism at all.<p>I suppose this just represents that the NSA at least in the past had various factions inside it, one of which lead to SELinux.
Even if an operating system were provably secure in the software layer, it might still be vulnerable to hardware backdoors:<p><a href="http://www.eteknix.com/expert-says-nsa-have-backdoors-built-into-intel-and-amd-processors/" rel="nofollow">http://www.eteknix.com/expert-says-nsa-have-backdoors-built-...</a>
It should be relatively easy to develop an automated tool to reformat LaTEX papers to a single column format more suitable for web distribution. Actually, LaTEX itself should be able provide all of the infrastructure for this. Given this, isn't it odd that papers get published to the web as 2 column PDFs? I know how/why it happens, but still.
Does anyone have a fix for the missing ligatures problem this PDF exhibits? "fl", "fi", and "ff" are blank as viewed under evince and xpdf