Category: Uncategorized
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Software Security: The Badness-ometer
Here is another excerpt from my new book, Software Security: Building Security In. Application Security Tools: Good or Bad? Application security testing products are being sold as a solution to the problem of insecure software. Unfortunately, these first-generation solutions are not all they are cracked up to be. They may help us diagnose, describe, and…
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Software Security: The Trinity of Trouble
[Ed Felten says: Please welcome Gary McGraw as guest blogger for the next week. Gary is CTO at Cigital and co-author of two past books with me. He’s here to post excerpts from his new book, Software Security: Building Security In, which was released this week. The book offers practical advice about how to design…
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Sony CD DRM Paper Released
Today Alex and I released our paper about the Sony CD DRM episode. This is the full, extended version of the paper, with a bunch of new material that hasn’t been published or posted before. As an experiment, we posted draft sections of the paper here and asked readers for comments and feedback. The experiment…
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Secure Flight Mothballed
Secure Flight, the planned next-generation system for screening airline passengers, has been mothballed by the Transportation Security Administration, according to an AP story by Leslie Miller. TSA chief Kip Hawley cited security concerns and questions about the program’s overall direction. Last year I served on the Secure Flight Working Group, a committee of outside technology…
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Quality of Service: A Quality Argument?
One of the standard arguments one hears against network neutrality rules is that network providers need to provide Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees to certain kinds of traffic, such as video. If QoS is necessary, the argument goes, and if net neutrality rules would hamper QoS by requiring all traffic to be treated the same,…
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Analog Hole Bill Requires "Open and Public" Discussion of Secret Technology
Today I want to return to the Sensenbrenner-Conyers analog hole bill, which would impose a secret law – a requirement that all devices that accept analog video inputs must implement a secret technical specification for something called a VEIL detector. If you want to see this specification, you have to pay a $10,000 fee to…
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AOL, Yahoo Challenge Email Neutrality
AOL and Yahoo will soon start using Goodmail, a system that lets bulk email senders bypass the companies’ spam filters by paying the companies one-fourth of a cent per message, and promising not to send unsolicited messages, according to a New York Times story by Saul Hansell. Pay-to-send systems are one standard response to spam.…
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Report: Many Apps Misconfigure Security Settings
My fellow Princeton computer scientists Sudhakar Govindavajhala and Andrew Appel released an eye-opening report this week on access control problems in several popular applications. In the old days, operating systems had simple access control mechanisms. In Unix, each file belonged to an owner and a (single) group of users. The owner had the option to…
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Paper Naming Contest
So our Sony CD DRM paper is virtually done, except for one thing: the title. We hope you can help us out. We’re looking for a phrase from a song lyric, song title, or album title that is distinctive and can be read as a pithy comment on the whole Sony CD DRM incident. It…
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What's in the Secret VEIL Test Results?
I wrote last week about how the analog hole bill would mandate use of the secret VEIL technology. Because the law would require compliance with the VEIL specification, that spec would effectively be part of the law. Call me old-fashioned, but I think there’s something wrong when Congress is considering a secret bill that would…