Computers at Risk: Does Anyone Remember?

Abstract

In the fall of 1988, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council to address the security and trustworthiness of US computing and communications systems. The board formed the System Security Study Committee, consisting of 16 distinguished representatives from government, academia, and the commercial sectors. David Clark, a senior research scientist at the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, chaired the committee. Meeting three times each in 1989 and 1990, the committee conferred with federal government researchers as well as with officials and security experts from industry. Its findings were published in early 1991 in the report Computers at Risk: Safe Computing in the Information Age. As noted in preface to the report, the committee attempted to forge a "consensus in the face of different technical and professional perspectives."