From: rparratt@london.micrognosis.com (Richard Parratt)
Date: Wed, 25 Jan 95 02:12:40 PST
To: jamesd@netcom.com
Subject: Re: Clinton freezes U.S. assets of Mideast groups
Message-ID: <9501251010.AA03760@pero>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> The Eurodollar market got started because Russia feared 
> arbitrary confiscation of its dollar bank accounts.

Not actually true. It was because US banks were
subject to statutory limits on the amount of interest
they could pay on dollar deposits.

> At present it seems to me that unix machines on the internet
> are intrinsicly insecure -- the methods used to secure them
> are a collection of ad hoc patches.  For example all
> unix machines are vulnerable to the trojan
> horse attack.

Banks are intrinsically insecure. All banks are subject to
the "sawn-off shotgun" attack, also the "kidnap the
managers family" attack and several others.

> Windows NT is supposedly secure.  Certainly its design makes
> it possible to write software that is intrinsicly secure,

Why do you think that? Certainly it's compartmentalism
is better than UNIX, and as a "ground-up" design it's
probably seen better QA than UNIX. However, it hasn't had
20 years of interest from hackers and others. Also, while
the NT kernel may be *better*, several subsystems have
all the problems of UNIX, e.g. TCP/IP and the sequence
number attack.

I like NT, but it will never be a security panacea.

--
Richard Parratt