Playing for Keeps: Will security threats bring an end to general-purpose computing?

Abstract

Inflection points come at you without warning and quickly recede out of reach. We may be nearing one now. If so, we are now about to play for keeps, and “we” doesn’t mean just us security geeks. If anything, it’s because we security geeks have not worked the necessary miracles already that an inflection point seems to be approaching at high velocity.

Index Terms

• Security and privacy

• Social and professional topics

  • Computing / technology policy

    • Computer crime

  • Professional topics

    • Management of computing and information systems

      • Software management

        • Software maintenance

• Software and its engineering

  • Software creation and management

    • Software post-development issues

    • Software verification and validation

      • Empirical software validation

  • Software organization and properties

    • Software functional properties

      • Formal methods