> yeah. > but none of this changes the fact that it IS possible to write completely secure code. > -- mic
And it IS possible that a man will walk on Mars someday. But its not practical or realistic in the society we live in today. I'm sorry mic, but I have to disagree with you here. It is EXTREMELY difficult to have code be 100% correct if an application has any level of real use or complexity. There will be security defects. The weakest link here is the human factor, and people make mistakes. More importantly, threats are constantly evolving and what you may consider completely secure today may not be tomorrow when a new attack vector is recognized that may attack your software. And unless you wrote every single line of code yourself without calling out to ANY libraries, you cannot rely on the security of other libraries or components that may NOT have the same engineering discipline that you may have on your own code base. Ross Anderson once said that secure software engineering is about building systems to remain dependable in the face of malice, error, or mischance. I think he has something there. If we build systems to maintain confidentiality, integrity and availability, we have the ability to fail gracefully in a manner to recover from unknown or changing problems in our software without being detrimental to the user, or their data. I don't think we should ever stop striving to reach secure coding nirvana. But I also understand that in the real world we are still in our infancy when it comes to secure software as a discipline, and we still have much to learn before we will reach it. Regards, Dana Epp [Microsoft Security MVP] http://silverstr.ufies.org/blog/ _______________________________________________ Secure Coding mailing list (SC-L) SC-L@securecoding.org List information, subscriptions, etc - http://krvw.com/mailman/listinfo/sc-l List charter available at - http://www.securecoding.org/list/charter.php