Over the past couple of months I’ve been giving an evolving talk on why we don’t yet have secure systems, despite over 50 years of work in the field. I first gave this at an NSF futures workshop, and will give it a few more times this summer and fall.

As I was last reviewing my notes, it occurred to me that many of the themes I’ve spoken about have been included in past posts here in the blog, and are things I’ve been talking about for nearly my entire career. It’s disappointing how little progress I’ve seen on so many fronts. The products on the market, and the “experts” who get paid big salaries to be corporate and government advisors and who get the excessive press coverage, also serve to depress.

My current thinking is to write a series of blog posts to summarize my thinking on this general topic. I’m not sure how many I’ll write, but I have a list of probable topics already in mind. They break out roughly into (in approximate order of presentation):

• Definition & metrics
• History
• Changes in technology
• Research & Development
• Legacy and Inertia
• Bad practices
• Media & milieu focus
• Funding
• Law enforcement
• National policies
• International issues

Each of these will be of moderate length, with some references and links to material to read. If you’re interested in a preview, I recommend looking at some of my recent talks archived on YouTube, some of my past blog posts here, and oral histories of various pioneers in the field of infosec done by the Babbage Institute (including, perhaps, my own).

I’ll start with the first posting sometime in the next few days, after I get a little more caught up from my vacation. But I thought I’d make this post, first, to solicit feedback on ideas that people might like me to add to the list.

My first post will be about the definition of security — and why part of the problem is that we can’t very well fix something that we can’t reliably define and thus obviously don’t completely understand.