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Comment by bediger4000 | Hacker News Reader

The youngest references are from 1998, so I'm guessing this was written by 2000, before the Very Bad Indeed 9/11 incidents. Also, it doesn't mention terrorism at all.

I suppose this just represents that the NSA at least in the past had various factions inside it, one of which lead to SELinux.

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NSA always sponsored information assurance work due to their Information Assurance Directorate's mission to protect COMSEC of military and defense contractors. They helped invent the INFOSEC field in an attempt to secure military machines. Military organizations and NSA sponsored many projects to demonstrate clean-slate secure systems (eg Aesec's GEMSOS), improve existing ones (eg Trusted OS's), and protect specific types of applications (eg SeaView RDBMS). The Bell paper above and Shaefer paper below trace it all the best.

Anyway, the market went with insecure everything for price, performance, and backward compatibility. DOD/NSA even started buying insecure stuff for similar reasons. NSA's export restrictions and focus on military-like standards made most of the vendors go belly up or cancel future work. Now, only Boeing SNS Server, BAE XTS-400, and Aesec's GEMSOS remain from that time along with the "Trusted" OS's that weren't secure to begin with. SELinux, DTW, High Assurance Platform (not high assurance), and so on are their latest trend of putting good security "features" into COTS technology without the "assurance" that they're built securely. Even before Snowden leaks, I called out their INFOSEC people for doing more for the enemy than our security pushing garbage like that.

Today, I wonder if they did it on purpose. Regardless, their stuff can't be trusted without thorough review because of so much incompetence. The best work (eg CheriBSD) is coming out of DARPA, NSF, and other projects. So we don't need NSA anyway. :)

NSA have been divided from the word go.

One the one hand they are to spy on the communications of "enemies", on the other they are to defend the nation against such spying.

Problem is that you basically can't do one without compromising the other.

That they have to defend the nation is a common misconception. They were only legally required to protect the COMSEC of military. This was extended to protect defense contractors as well. They don't have to protect the rest of us and have a conflict of interest against doing it. They'll provide some support (e.g. SELinux, "secure" configs) but ensure they can bypass it.

It was published on October 1998, I was wondering about that when I submitted but found it interesting nonetheless

If you find our field's history interesting, then I have more good stuff. The Ware Report [1] was what started it. An interesting read to look back at them looking forward and see how close they got. Foundations [2] were then laid. Schaefer summarizes [3] all this from start to the failed finish. Capability-security model [4] and tagged systems [5] happened in parallel. Both seem more appropriate to commercial systems. Enough time brought me to real problem [6] and our tiny niche is working on solutions from chip up for every security model.

Hopefully someone will put one in production in next several years. CheriBSD already runs on FPGA's & Linux runs on some. Getting really close to PC's we can trust [a bit more]. :)

[1] http://seclab.cs.ucdavis.edu/projects/history/papers/ware70....

[2] http://seclab.cs.ucdavis.edu/projects/history/seminal.html

[3] https://www.acsac.org/2004/papers/ClassicPaperSchafer.pdf

[4] http://homes.cs.washington.edu/~levy/capabook/

[5] http://www.smecc.org/The%20Architecture%20%20of%20the%20Burr...

[6] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/04/dan_geer_on_h...

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