[Cryptography] What do we know? (Was 'We cannot trust' ...)

[Bill Frantz]

On 12/28/13 at 10:17 AM, brg at gladman.plus.com (Brian Gladman) wrote:

>Following on from this, Honeywell was funded by Dod to produce a new
>secure computer system (called SCOMP) and this again received
>certification.  But it was never deployed (AFAIK) because it was
>realised that the costs of ongoing support would fall entirely on DoD.

There is an amusing story about SCOMP. SCOMP was designed to get 
an A1 security rating, and after jumping through all the hoops 
actually received that rating. Somewhat after that, someone 
discovered a quite high bandwidth covert channel in SCOMP. One 
of the developers was heard to quip, "I don't want to call is 
secure. I just want to call it A1."

Cheer - Bill

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