The Department of Homeland Security sent someone to give a keynote address at the RSA Security conference:
Retired lieutenant general John Gordon, presidential assistant and advisor to the Homeland Security Council, used his keynote address at the RSA Security conference in San Francisco on Wednesday to question how much effort developers are putting into ensuring their code is watertight. "This is a problem for every company that writes software. It cannot be beyond our ability to learn how to write and distribute software with much higher standards of care and much reduced rate of errors and much reduced set of vulnerabilities," he said.
Gordon's keynote followed a day after that of Microsoft chairman Bill Gates.
According to Gordon, if developers could reduce the error and vulnerability rate by a factor of 10, it would "probably eliminate something like 90 percent of the current security threats and vulnerabilities.
Gordon is author of the popular management book The Things I've Learned: 1.0 - 0.1 = 0.9 and Other Observations.
Posted by cradle at February 27, 2004 12:32 PM