Can reliability and security be joined reliably and securely?

The combined topics of reliability and security are briefly traced in relation to the past and present endeavors of the Air Force Research Laboratory's Information Directorate. It is concluded that in the realm of information assurance, system features created to tolerate benign failures and to respond to attack must be stressed and tested beforehand and their effectiveness predicted, otherwise they might inadvertently magnify the attacker's power. With the explosive growth of distributed and mobile systems and the need for information assurance to address the accompanying vulnerabilities, one history lesson comes to mind: although ancient Rome was not built in a day, it did not take very long for it to fall once the barbarians took hold.