Archive - November 2000
Fail Secure – The Correct Way to Crash
Eric Vanderburg
Anyone who has taken a martial art class could speak to the importance of learning how to fall. In the course of training, a person will fall many times and it is important to know how to fall properly so that injury does not occur. Similarly, software needs to be able to crash in such a way that injury in the form of an information security vulnerability does not occur.
Systems and software will crash and attackers will try to make it crash to reveal potential vulnerabilities in its startup routine. The job of security professionals and security minded developers is to architect a solution that fails securely by determining what should happen if a component in a system were to fail. This concept, called “Fail Secure”, is defined by Wikipedia as “a device or features which, in the event of failure, responds in a way that will cause no harm, or at least a minimum of harm, to other devices or danger to personnel.”
