14 May 2003
Security Story

Way back in the early 1990's, the company I was working for at the time got a demo of a new network server. I believe it was called 'NetMaster' or 'NetFrame' or something like that - this was before the Internet had come up on the radar, and it ran a Novell OS. The company is out of business now, I Googled for it and came up empty except for the names, of course.

Anyway, the salesman doing the demo was bragging about how completely secure and fault tolerant the system was - it had two of everything, disk arrays (before RAID), motherboards, power supplies and two (twenty four hour capacity) battery backups. I asked how long it would take to rebuild the file system (Novell had a rather strenous checking procedure in those days, aprticularly with open shares) after a system crash.

The salesman assured me that the system couldn't and wouldn't ever crash. I asked if I could try and crash it. He said "Sure - be my guest!". I think he expected me to leave the room, go to my terminal and attempt to hack it.

I reached out with my foot and turned the power switch off.

It took them two days to rebuild the file system.

So I was more than a bit amused when I ran across this little tale this morning from ZDNet News.

With the implications for Smart Cards, I certainly hope that this gets the kind of notice it deserves from the security community. If it doesn't, the only kind of 'smart card' you'll be able to buy ten years from now will be from Hallmark....

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