Jon, et al. There might be some value in looking into the history of Multics, the IBM System/360, and DEC VAX/VMS. These were systems built from the ground up with security in mind, even at the hardware level for address-space protection. I'm sure there are other good cases, but these come to mind. I believe that Peter J. Denning's work on operating systems would also be related. We had a mainframe guy from Compuware come in recently to talk to students about current mainframes, which amount almost totally to the IBM z Systems, descendants of the 360/370. When someone asked about security, he said forget about it. No one's ever hacked a z System. There's this whole, heavy-duty, bullet-proof world of hyper-secure systems, and then the swamps and tangles most of us live in that evolved from Unix, MS-DOS, the 8086, the Mac OS and other jury-rigged OSs and hardware architectures. - Bill On 3/11/12, Jon Lindsay <jrlindsay@ucsd.edu> wrote:
Hello all, I have the feeling that the history of computer security, from hacking techniques to the evolution of the information security industry to fearmongering over cybersecurity, is a somewhat understudied area. I have seen some work on the development of government policy and threat framing (i.e., by Myriam Dunn Cavelty) but I'm less aware of anything on the evolution of the technical and industrial dark arts. If there is some good work out there, I would love to see it. Bonus points if you can tell me when the awful phrase "digital pearl harbor" first appeared! Cheers, Jon