In a field with few design principles, rules of thumb, or laws named after people more influential than Murphy, with no Plancks or Avogadros to hold constant, and little quantification of any sort (we know how to count bad things and how long it takes to fix them), it appears the best we can do right now is tell stories. Over (enough) beer we cons up lightly anonymized War Stories about late night phone calls, scary devices, hard to find bugs (which exploiters somehow found), the backups that didn't, stupid criminals, craven prosecutors, cute hacks (but "don't try this at home") and pointy-haired bosses ... There will be a few of these in this talk, but also some Cautionary Tales, parables, isomorphs of the Old Stories which demonstrate that human frailty and the Law of Unexpected Consequences operate most strongly near the intersection of Bleeding Edge and Slippery Slope. Also just a bit about the future.  

Presenter Bio

Mark Seiden, Cutter Consortium, Senior Consultant

Mark Seiden, a programmer since the '60s, has generalized for the last 25 years in security, network, and software engineering for companies worldwide. As a Yahoo Paranoid and as a consultant, his recent projects have included design, architecture, and implementation for eBusiness systems, security for online financial transaction processing and for a distributed document processing system, as an expert in computer crime cases (whodunit and whadidtheydo) and testing of network, procedural and physical security in facilities and systems all over the world, in research environments and universities. Time Digital named him one of the 50 "CyberElite" in their first annual list, and he's been involved with four National Academy of Sciences studies on some trippy subjects. Mark was also the first registrant of the domain, food.com. He's been played by an actor in a rather bad movie, and his Erdos number is 4.