[Cryptography] North Korea and Sony

dan at geer.org dan at geer.org
Thu Dec 11 10:22:12 EST 2014


Jerry, you and I are in violent agreement that there is enormous
fragility in the buildout of systems as presently deployed.

So many things come to mind, the most pithy being Mike O'Dell's
comment that "Left to themselves, creative engineers will deliver
the most complicated system they think they can debug."  The financial
services industry has proven Mike's contention at scale, viz., that
we humans can (will), in general, build systems too complex to then
operate.  Let us hope that mandated electronic health records plus
15K hospitals plus three dozen Federal agencies plus all the world's
reinsurers will not re-prove that same contention.

But as to Geithner and stress tests, my last column(*) was precisely
on that point and I did, indeed, steal directly from the financial
market experience in proposing a prescription for national-scale
"digital life."

Stress Analysis
https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/dec14/geer

--dan



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