Windows 2000 declared secure

[Adam Shostack]

On Sat, Nov 02, 2002 at 11:54:36AM -0500, Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
| The word "moderate" here is very unfortunate. In reading such
| statements, one needs to understand a bit of subtext. The Common
| Criteria community is very concerned about the possibility that people
| will perceive assurance as impossibly difficult. In consequence, there
| has been a tendency to a form of "grade inflation." The effectiveness of
| the levels is modestly exaggerated, and the importance of going for
| higher levels is grossly understated.
| 
| One unfortunate consequence is that NSA has seen no need to publish
| guidelines on performing higher-level evaluations, because their has
| been no demand.

Could you define 'importance' here?  Given a lack of demand, what are
you using as criteria?  How can we translate that into something
that's important to buyers? Or otherwise convince the buyers of
systems to demand better?  (Leading to NSA publishing those higher
level eval guidelines, etc.)

Adam



-- 
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once."
					               -Hume



---------------------------------------------------------------------
The Cryptography Mailing List
Unsubscribe by sending "unsubscribe cryptography" to majordomo at wasabisystems.com