Don’t Get Norteled

According to a Wall Street Journal report, the collapse of Nortel was largely the work of a few stolen passwords.

Firewalls, intrusion detection and the rest of the security toolkit all rest on one assumption: that you can judge the intentions of whoever sends you a stream of bits. Wes Kussmaul argues that assumption doesn’t hold.

What works instead is accountability: identity credentials you can rely on, and digital signatures everywhere.