Posts Tagged ‘security’

Cisco SAFE 2.0

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

Just a quick note that the second version of Cisco SAFE came out this week at the RSA show. You can get it here. If you thought my original was long at 66 pages, prepare for a shock: the new one clocks in at over 300! I’ve not yet read it but I got an overview from some of the authors a couple weeks back and I liked what I heard. I guess I shouldn’t make too many jokes about its length, it is still less than half the length of my book on the same subject.

While security best practices don’t change quickly, we wrote the original SAFE back in 2000 and a lot has happened since then. Many of the foundation best practices remain very relevant but there are some new tools and techniques that can help protect networks against today’s threats.

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John Markoff’s “Do We Need a New Internet?”

Monday, February 16th, 2009

John Markoff has an op-ed in the New York Times where he makes the case for starting over on the Internet in order to improve security. Lots of others are talking about his piece all over the blogosphere–this discussion is clearly warranted. Markoff’s arguments are flimsy and supported by vague statements from experts. One of those experts, Gene Spafford, has already repudiated the implied conclusions of the piece.

My biggest complaint is that in an article entitled, “Do We Need a New Internet?,” the absence of quotes from anyone who would answer that question, “No” is irresponsible, even for an op-ed. “Starting over” is a very naive perspective in the engineering of in-production systems. I’ve been in meetings throughout my career where someone in the room said, “If only we started over.” That is a tantalizing thought, but ultimately impossible in the real world.

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