Gates and the code-jockey elite
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Five years after becoming Microsoft's chief software architect, he can finally be judged on a record, CNET News.com's Charles Cooper says.
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E-mail users inundated with unsolicited spam messages have reason to hope Microsoft will develop better tools for tackling the problem: Bill Gates is suffering more than anyone.
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(InfoWorld) - Cryptography is no mean field. After all, the science was invented by humans for the purpose of concealing information from other humans. That means that the best cryptographers have to be blindingly smart, with a mastery of mathematics but also a firm grasp of human psychology and, these days, fields such as computer science. Paul Kocher, president and chief scientist of Cryptography Research is a good example of the breed. A cryptography superstar, Kocher is credited with helping discover two different techniques for defeating certain kinds of encryption algorithms. Heâs also a corporate executive whoâs devoted his life to helping create cryptographic applications that can be used in the real world. Kocher sat down to talk security with InfoWorld Senior Editor Paul F. Roberts at the recent RSA Security Conference in San Francisco. Despite making his name by poking holes in encryption, Kocher says that crypto hacks are the last thing enterprise IT should worry about. A much bigger problem is wrestling with the security implications of application and OS âsupersizingâ that is being fueled by a new generation of powerful processors. InfoWorld: Tell us a bit about the history of Cryptography Research and how the security environment has changed since you first started the company.                                                     Paul Kocher: I started Cryptography Research 11 years ago. When I first started working on these problems, we were still at the point where you could understand how systems work. This was back in the DOS days. You had 640K of memory and could run one program at a time. These days, I have no clue whatâs running on my laptop. And you probably have no idea, either. Thereâs too much software there. Mooreâs Law has created obesity in systems, so when youâre trying to come up with ways to keep things secret despite this, itâs an enormous problem. IW: Cryptography is often followed as a kind of arms race, with people who want to make stronger encryption pitted against those who want to break it. Is that the wrong discussion to have? PK: There are a few pieces that are strong. The math behind modern algorithms is incredibly robust. Thatâs the thing most people focus on: âWe have this brick and itâs really strong, so if we have a system that includes this brick, it will also be really strong.â But implementations are where the problems lie. People tend to get enamored with the cryptography and the algorithms and not pay attention to other things that end up failing. IW: You talk about the âbrittlenessâ in much of application security. If you were an enterprise shop with internally developed applications, what steps would you take to reduce that brittleness? PK: One thing Iâd do is just step back and have the engineers think about how they would attack the system. Itâs a different mind set than how to build features. You start looking for that thread that lets you in, and you learn something useful. Also, try to build your application so that it doesnât need sophisticated security capabilities. If youâve got an application on the Web where itâs exposed to outside attacks, just leave the feature out thatâs going to create the risks. IW: What about mobile devices? Microsoft this week announced a new version of Windows Mobile. Are platform companies going to repeat the same mistakes they made on the desktop? PK: I think Microsoft is certainly following the path it followed with the PC, though the security problems havenât caught up yet because mobile devices arenât worth hacking yet. Thereâs an inflection point that people almost never recognize until they hit it. Itâs the point at which a system becomes worth attacking. You hit the threshold when someone figures out that they could make more money attacking your system than by doing whatever it is theyâre doing and after factoring in the risks. At that point, the dynamic changes completely. As you take mobile devices and put more functions on them, someone will wake up and realize that they can make $15 million hacking them, as opposed to the $80,000 to do their current job. We just donât know whether that will be this year or 10 years from now.
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This article is the first in a new, regular series of articles and interviews with top Microsoft program managers. Our goal is to give you a close-up, helpful and informative look at things
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E-mail users inundated with  unsolicited "spam" messages have reason to hope Microsoft Corp.  will develop better tools for tackling the problem: Bill Gates  is suffering more than anyone.
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bulk messages clogging instant-messaging accounts. AOL and its Anti-Spam Alliance partners -- EarthLink, Microsoft, and Yahoo
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How far is too far when it comes to the freedom of software? Plus: Palm slipping, Windows sliding.
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A security expert has found programming errors in Oracle 11g that left security vulnerabilities.
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A cadre of unknown designers shapes everyday human-machine interactions. By Andrew Blum from Wired magazine.
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Bill Gates and Microsoft were in the news a lot this week, most notably with CEO Steve Ballmer claiming that Gates is the most spammed person in the world.
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According to Microsoft&#39;s Chief Executive, Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates is number one in the amount of spam a person gets. According to the Microsoft CEO, Gates gets over four million messages a day, most of which are junk.
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Security researchers at South Korea's first international hacker conference rip holes in Linux and VOIP. But where are the drinking games? Quinn Norton reports from Seoul.
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By Julio Ojeda-Zapata, Pioneer Press, St. Paul, Minn.  Sep. 6--Software development once hewed to a tried-and-true formula. Coders pounded on keyboards behind closed doors for months. Finally, their products shipped in shrink-wrapped boxes to fanfare.
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Bill Gates hints at possible partnership with giant electronics company.
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A computer security researcher figures out exactly how a high-tech scammer
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Bill Gates is right about one thing: asking people to use a two-factor form of authentication would go a long way toward alleviating a lot of the password problems that plague computer security today.
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&quot;Spam is a major security problem,&quot; acknowledges Microsoft founder Bill Gates, but he maintains that progress has been made in the fight against unsolicited e-mail.