> Of course, I'd be interested in your thoughts on the empiracle stuff and security evaluations for further improvement. For fun, you might try to apply my security framework or empirical methods to your own systems to see what you find. Only for the brave, though. ;)

If only I worked in an environment where that was feasible. I write Perl for a very small off-market investment firm (event ticket brokerage) as the only software engineer. My work time is split between implementing UI changes to our internal webapp (which we are thankfully going to be subbing out), reporting and alerting tools for the data we collect, manipulating and maintaining the schema as data sources are added, remove or change and maintaining the tools and system that streams the data into the model. While getting to a more secure state would be wonderful, I'm still working to reduce the number of outright blatant bugs I push into production every day due to the speed at which we need to iterate. :/

> Counter point to Dan Geer: Hardware architecture is the problem

This is interesting, and aligns quite well with the current discussion. We live with the trade-offs of the past, which while they may have made sense in the short term, are slowly strangling us now.

> Bell Looking Back

An interesting paper on the problems of security system development and how market changes have helped and hampered over time. I admit I skimmed portions of it, and much of the later appendix sections, as my time is limited. The interesting take-away I got from it is that our government security standards and certification are woefully inadequately provided for, where they aren't outright ignored (both at a software level and at an organizational policy level). I now feel both more and less secure, since I wasn't aware of the specifics of government security certification, so seeing that there are many and are somewhat well defined encourages me to believe the problem at least received rigorous attention. Unfortunately it looks like it's a morass of substandard delivery and deployment, so there that. :/ It is a decade old though, so perhaps there have been positive developments since?

> Essay on how to re-design security evaluations to work
and from that your "nick p on improving security evaluations" and
> List of empirically-proven methods for robust, software engineering

These all look quite well thought out, from my relative inexperience with formal computer security and exploitation research (I've followed it more closely at some times than others, and it's a path I almost went down after college, but did not). The only thing I would consider is that while these are practices for developing secure systems, and they could (and should in some cases) be adopted for regular systems, I think there is a place for levels of adherence to how strict you need to be, and how much effort needs to go into your design and development. Just as we require different levels of expertise and assurance for building a small shed, a house, an office building, and a skyscraper, it would be useful to have levels of certification for software that provided some assurance that specific levels of engineering were met.