Clarke Solicits Cyber-Security Input at MIT

[InfoSec News <isn () c4i org>]

Forwarded from: William Knowles <wk () c4i org>

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,639096,00.asp

By Dennis Fisher 
October 17, 2002 

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - If Wednesday night's town hall meeting here was any
indication, Richard Clarke is getting just what he asked for.

After releasing a draft of the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace
for comment in September, Clarke has embarked on a cross-country tour,
soliciting feedback on the document and stumping for passage of the
bill that would create the Department of Homeland Security. During his
most recent stop, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
audience members gave Clarke a wide range of suggestions for the
strategy, with many of them centering on the theme of vendor
responsibility for insecure software.

Many people asked Clarke, chairman of the President's Critical 
Infrastructure Protection Baord, to consider recommending some form of 
regulation for the software industry as a way to spur vendors into 
writing more secure applications. Clarke resisted the idea, as he has 
in the past, saying that he'd rather rely on market forces and 
customer demand to weed out the careless vendors. 

One area where Clarke agreed that new legislation might be in order is 
security research. One audience member complained that the Digital 
Millennium Copyright Act and anti-hacking laws are preventing 
legitimate security researchers from publishing information on new 
vulnerabilities. 

"You're basically letting them bully us into keeping vulnerabilities 
secret," the questioner said. "Shouldn't there be some legislation on 
this?" 

"Personally, I think the answer to that is yes," Clarke responded. "We 
need to have everyone in this country who's an IT expert looking for 
vulnerabilities." 

Jeff Schiller, the event moderator, had another suggestion. 

"We also need vendors who when they put out critical security fixes 
don't attach a new license agreement," said Schiller, MIT's network 
manager and head of the Internet Engineering Task Force's security 
section. The comment, which refers to an agreement that Microsoft 
Corp. included with a service pack it released earlier this year, drew 
a big round of applause from the audience. 

In response to several comments about the apathy that many big 
software vendors show toward security issues, Clarke urged customers 
and researchers to bring their concerns to him if they aren't 
satisfied with the vendor's answer. He also pointed a finger at the 
software makers for not making smart choices in configuring their 
products. 

"People have been shipping software with totally needless, stupid 
functionality turned on," he said. 

Clarke, who served on the National Security Council during the Clinton 
administration, likened the current attitude toward security to the 
way some Washington officials used to feel about the potential for 
terrorism in the United States: it will never happen to us. 

"Somebody, someday is going to hurt our economy if we don't start 
dealing with our vulnerabilities," said Clarke. 



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