| The Initial Costs and Maintenance Costs of Protocols (2008) | |||||||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||||||
| Software-engineering academics focussed for many years on the costs of de-veloping the first version of a product, and ignored the costs of subsequent maintenance. We taught our students the ‘waterfall model’, and biased research towards the sort of tools and ideas that complemented it, such as formal methods. Meanwhile the economics of software had changed. Software is now so complex that the only way to build version N is to start with version N-1. Iterative de-velopment methodologies now rule, and the tools that real developers say have helped them most in the last fifteen years are not theorem provers, but auto-mated regression-testing and bug-reporting systems. Nowadays, the maintenance is the product. Security engineers have been falling into a similar trap. For years, we thought that the problem of authentication began and ended with trustworthy boot-strapping. Once Alice and Bob shared that elusive session key – and could prove mathematically that no-one else did – we could type up the research paper and head for the pub. Again, the real world has changed. Security maintainability is | |||||||||||||
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