White House Tales – 1

“Does anyone here know anything about ‘firewalls’?” asked Steve Walker, the CEO of Trusted Information Systems (TIS). If you read Mechanizing Proof [stderr] stw crops up a couple of times – he was one of the proponents of trustworthy design through formal verification, and TIS produced an evaluated version of UNIX known as Trusted Xenix.

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The Elephant In The Connected Room

Computer security is a new(ish) field, so we get to make up names for things. That’s an advantage and a disadvantage – it means that marketing people can come up with new-sounding names for old stuff, and sometimes customers get all excited and buy it because it sounds so new!

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