Software Security Quotes

Yet, I am convinced that there is a need for high quality software, and the time will come when it will be recognized that it is worth investing effort in its development and in using a careful, structured approach based on safe, structured languages.

National security always matters, obviously. But the reality is that if you have an open door in your software for the good guys, the bad guys get in there, too.

One of the ways that Microsoft beat Apple way back in the day was that they were a lot more open; today, in the world I come from, the free software and open-source world, Microsoft is not generally viewed as open; they're viewed as proprietary.

Agitator and the Agitar Management Dashboard lower the barriers to accountability in software development and increase the value of developer testing.

It's simply unrealistic to depend on secrecy for security in computer software. You may be able to keep the exact workings of the program out of general circulation, but can you prevent the code from being reverse-engineered by serious opponents? Probably not. The secret to strong security: less reliance on secrets.

You will not even have enough time to go online and download all the patches to your computer before it is infected.

Autonomous weapons are the worst possiblity for an Aitificial Intelligence application. I don't even want a single gun to be automomous.... We should ahve laws against autonomous weapons. One of the major problems with autonomous weapons is that they become the enemy's arsenal when the software is hacked and that always happens sooner or later.

I actually am fairly uncomfortable about it, even if our firm stipulation was that they cannot tell us what to do. We are simply doing what we do anyways - securing software - and they have no say in the matter. I try to convince myself that our grant means a half of a cruise missile doesn't get built.

There is a strong movement towards increased accountability for software developers and software development organizations.

While I personally believe strongly in the philosophy and ideology of the Free Software movement, you can't win people over just on philosophy; you have to have a better product, too.

The problem is, we're moving to software-as-service, which can be yanked or transformed at any moment. The ability of your PC to run independent code is an important safety valve.

Proprietary software tends to have malicious features. The point is with a proprietary program, when the users don't have the source code, we can never tell. So you must consider every proprietary program as potential malware.

I'm not of the opinion that all software will be open source software. There is certain software that fits a niche that is only useful to a particular company or person: for example, the software immediately behind a web site's user interface. But the vast majority of software is actually pretty generic.

Software companies should take more responsibility for security holes, especially in browsers and e-mail clients. There are some straightforward things the industry should be doing right now to fix things, and I don't know why they haven't been done yet.

Once a term like "open source" entered our vocabulary, one could recast the whole public policy calculus in very different terms, so that instead of discussing the public interest, we are discussing the interests of individual software developers, while claiming that this is a discussion about "innovation" and "progress," not "accountability" or "security."

A zero-day exploit is a method of hacking a system. It's sort of a vulnerability that has an exploit written for it, sort of a key and a lock that go together to a given software package. It could be an internet web server. It could be Microsoft Office. It could be Adobe Reader or it could be Facebook.

I want to see us remain convinced that software matters in the future.

It turns out that we can build perfectly secure software, and yet people can still get hurt.

If you use a proprietary program or somebody else's web server, you're defenceless. You're putty in the hands of whoever developed that software.

There are lots of Linux users who don't care how the kernel works, but only want to use it. That is a tribute to how good Linux is.

Free open-source software, by its nature, is unlikely to feature secret back doors that lead directly to Langley, Va.

The reality of most software development is that the consequences of failure are simply nonexistent.

My reply is: the software has no known bugs, therefore it has not been updated.

At the time the Sendmail program had a very poor reputation with respect to security, with four root vulnerabilities per year for two successive years.

The challenge with Postfix, or with any piece of software, is to update software without introducing problems.