Saturday, March 30, 2024

A legend passes

Sad to see the news about Ross Anderson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_J._Anderson passing

https://alecmuffett.com/article/109513

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39864210

https://twitter.com/duncan_2qq/status/1773752269395099774 


Like many I was inspired and informed by his various editions of the "Security Engineering" book https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/book.html. I also explored the domain via papers like https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~fms27/papers/1999-StajanoAnd-duckling.pdf that I referenced in https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221199899_Platform_Trust_Beyond_BIOS_Using_the_Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface/references. I also cull wisdom from papers like https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/satan.pdf since having worked on the boundary of software and hardware for so long, sometimes errant hardware or firmware is truly an embodiment of 'Satan's Computer.'

My small interaction with Prof Anderson was during the writing of https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4842-6106-4

 


 My co-author and I reached out to see if Anderson would write a forward, with the below response


Luckily we did get a very insightful write-up


from Leendert Van Doorn https://blog.paramecium.org/about/.

This was an ironic pairing in retrospect seeing Anderson's critiques of Trusted Computing and Leendert's contemporary contributions to that domain, respectively. Having these titans both critique https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq-1.0.html and build a domain https://www.amazon.com/Practical-Guide-Trusted-Computing/dp/0132398427, like TCPA (now TCG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing_Group) Trusted Platforms Modules, represent a healthy aspect of technology evolution in my view. Differing views make any technology stronger, versus groupthink & homogeneity of thought.

 Sad times for the security community, though, with the loss of a legend.





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