RE: Hypothetical design question

["Dave Paris" <dparis () w3works com>]

Exactly my point.  The programmers certainly aren't the ones causing the
problems and most often aren't in a position to do much about it other than
to make some noise and hope someone higher up with two clues to rub together
hears them.  Unfortunately, it's all too common that events like this happen
about as frequently as being struck by lightning or winning the lottery.

Yes, the application design process, as it exists in far too many
environments, is horribly broken.  No new news there, I suppose.  Secure
application design and secure coding are quite different matters.  You can
create rather secure code in an incredibly insecure application design.
Since programmers are responsible for the code, that portion of securing the
application is up to them.  Since they're often excluded from the design
process, fatal flaws are injected into the design much further upstream.  To
wit:  Outlook's problems aren't due to buffer overflows, they're due to an
intrinsically bad design in the name of "innovation" (pronounced
"oh-no-vation" :-).

Kind Regards,
-dsp

-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Behalf Of Andreas Saurwein
Sent: Wednesday, January 28, 2004 10:49 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: RE: [SC-L] Hypothetical design question


At 28/1/2004 13:37 Wednesday, "Dave Paris" wrote:
> Not to wander from the strict topic or be inflamatory but more often than
> not it's the marketing department mandating "features".  Not too many
> programmers I know are in the position to just add features during their
> implementation. (at least in commercial-ware)  Heck, most programmers I
know
> have sufficient intellectual agility to realize that a lot of features
> currently found in common applications are just Really Bad Ideas [tm] from
> any number of angles, security ranking at or near the top.

So far my experience has been that "marketing department" has practically
no technical knowledge and usually consults one of those "system analysts"
which do not know much about programming, nothing about security and just
as much about user interface design and usability.
That the programmers are often just confronted with the facts after the
design is part of a bad design process.

> In short, please don't shoot the messenger.

The messenger is the first to shoot in order to avoid worse :)


cheers
Andreas