The six dumbest ideas in computer security (2005)
I wonder how well we all think this article has aged?<p>&quot;Penetrate and Patch&quot; is supposedly dumb. But what do we practically do with that? We&#x27;ve seen in the last decade or so a lot of long-lived software everyone thought was secure get caught with massive security bugs. Well, once some software you depend on has infact been found to have a bug, what&#x27;s there to do but patch it? If some software has never had a bug found in it, does that actually mean that it&#x27;s secure, or just that no skilled hackers have ever really looked hard at it?<p>Also web browsers face a constant stream of security issues. But so what? What are we supposed to do instead? Any simpler version doesn&#x27;t have the features we demand, so you&#x27;re stuck in a boring corner of the world.<p>&quot;Default Permit&quot; - nice idea in most cases. I&#x27;ve never heard of a computer that&#x27;s actually capable of only letting your most commonly used apps run though. It&#x27;s not very clear how you&#x27;d do that, and ensure none of them were ever tampered with, or be able to do development involving frequently producing new binaries, or figure out how to make sure no malicious code ever took advantage of whatever mechanism you want to use to make app development not terrible. And everyone already gripes about how locked-down iOS devices are, wouldn&#x27;t this mean making everything at least that locked down or more?