Bruce Schneier Interview on Salon

citmanual wrote to us with the Schneier interview on Salon. He's promoting his new book Secrets and Lies. I'm just about finished with it, and will be doing a review soon - it's quite good.

Comments

Limits of Formal Methods

[PHAEDRU5]

A long, long time ago I was utterly taken with formal methods. I lived and breathed Z and VDM.

Then one day I read a paper about the *limits* of formal methods. The one phrase summary of the article was that once a formally-verified program meets the real world, each time it's executed is a conjecture.

The paper seemed to be an argument against formal methods and as you might guess, all the heavy hitters with PhDs and post-doctoral work to defend generated a storm of complaint, the one phrase summary of which was that while formal methods might not be perfect, they shouldn't be abandoned.

I mention this because of the author's original notion of protecting ourselves by wrapping ourselves in mathematics, and his current appearance of despair.

It appears to me that the book's more a reaction to a crisis in faith than anything else. I don't think anyone really expects security to be uncrackable - we're got history going back to the pharaohs on that one, but neither should we throw the baby out with the bath water. I mean, I think I've seen at least one reaction that uses this article to predict the *imminent* *death* *of* *the* *internet*. As if!