Re: Reactive Firewalls

[Rick Smith <rsmith () securecomputing com>]

At 1:07 PM -0500 2/13/98, Rachel Rosencrantz wrote:

> Not to sound too much like a text book, but there are 3 critical aspects
> in security.  Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability.

Recently I've started to suspect that this particular decomposition of
computer security isn't that effective. It evolved when compusec funding
primarily targeted the confidentiality problem. Availability was declared
to be a non-objective ("too hard") but people convinced themselves that
some variant of the confidentiality problem could be "solved."

I think it's interesting that you can have high confidence in availability
without confidence in confidentiality and even even vice versa, but you
can't have confidence in either of them without high confidence in
integrity. But that's exactly what we don't have in the brave new world of
COTS bloatware.

Rick.
smith () securecomputing com