Читать книгу Security Engineering - Ross Anderson - Страница 140

At several times during the past 30 years, some people have thought that protocols had been ‘done’ and that we should turn to new research topics. They have been repeatedly proved wrong by the emergence of new applications with a new crop of errors and attacks to be explored. Formal methods blossomed in the early 1990s, then key management protocols; during the mid-1990's the flood of proposals for electronic commerce mechanisms kept us busy. Since 2000, one strand of protocol research has acquired an economic flavour as security mechanisms are used more and more to support business models; the designer's ‘enemy’ is often a commercial competitor, or even the customer. Another has applied protocol analysis tools to look at the security of application programming interfaces (APIs), a topic to which I'll return later.

Much protocol research is problem-driven, but there are still deep questions. How much can we get out of formal methods, for example? And how do we manage the tension between the principle that robust protocols are generally those in which everything is completely specified and checked and the system engineering principle that a good specification should not overconstrain the implementer?