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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Wow, That Sure is … inCONVENIENT…

In the late 1990s, the US Government was setting up a case to argue that hacking equated to terrorism. Because, while it was mostly being used for illicit state-craft, it could potentially be used by terrorists. In 1997, at a keynote for Black Hat Briefings, I warned the hacker community what was coming but – at that time – there was a great deal of “community outreach” being done by NSA – they were hiring hackers (whose work we now see leaking on a regular basis) and it was all very hip and friendly.

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Some Good Signs

Meanwhile, there are occasionally signs that the effort is paying off. Security hasn’t been too bad but it’s had its #MeToo moments and the conferences used to have “booth babes” and a lot of “locker room talk.”

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