10 October 2006

Microsoft to fore at ISSE 2006

Brian McKenna

EU Commissioner Viviane Reding exhorted the Union’s private sector to promote diversity in computing environments when opening the ISSE Conference in Rome today. “Diversity reduces risk”, she told delegates, “and introduces natural safeguards”.

She also hailed the opportunity of the continent-wide deployment of RFID, but cautioned against the risks of this “internet of things”. RFID, along with biometrics “has raised fears in the community which must be addressed”, she said. “Otherwise take up will not come to a good end”.

Reding told the event that the Commission has instructed the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) to develop an information sharing and threat alert system. ENISA’s Executive Director, Andrea Pirotti confirmed that work is in progress on this project.

Meanwhile, Reding’s opening address salvo against “captive markets” for IT suppliers in Europe found an echo in the first conference keynote. Bruce Schneier, CTO of Counterpane Internet Security instructed delegates on the economics of security. Understand four principles, he told delegates: the network effect; the high fixed costs, low marginal costs of IT; prohibitive switching costs; and the tendency of bad products to drive good products out of the market when sellers know much more than buyers.

These IT economics explain, he said, “why Microsoft’s strategy [of first mover advantage] makes a lot of sense”.

But in a spirited open source versus closed source debate, two Microsoft representatives, Ronny Bjones and Michael Howard showed how the supplier has nailed down the security of its OS and general product lines. “I’ve never met anyone from the Open Source movement whose full-time job was to find and fix software vulnerabilities”, challenged Bjones.

Countering, for the Open Source movement, Cambridge University’s Andy Ozment conceded that Microsoft is “doing a very good job on security”, but added that this had to do with regulation now being its biggest fear.

Which is where the EU Commissioner had come in. And where Bruce Schneier had made his keynote argument about forcing into line the interest of an economic actor in solving a problem with the capability to solve it.

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