.. _phk_thanks_peter:

Thanks Peter G. Neumann
=======================

Peter G. Neumann died a few days ago, at the ripe old age of 93,
and I find, much to my surprise, that I have never even once
mentioned him in these pages.

Before Varnish happened, I was lucky enough to score a little
subcontract far out in the corner of DARPA's "Composable High-Assurance
Trustworthy Systems" program, also known as "CHATS", which was
very much Peter's project.

I suspect Peter thought of CHATS would be his *Opus Magnum*, he
was 71 years old when the final report landed, and it was very
much the final word on how to build trustworthy systems.

The problem with final words, is that everybody assume that we're
done now, and so I find that far fewer people have read the report
than should have.

So please, grab a mug, a handful of crackers and a comfy chair:

https://www.csl.sri.com/~neumann/chats4.html

Trust me, it is *still* worth reading, in particular if you have
never read it before, and if for no other reason, then because
Peter's thinking had a huge influence on Vinyl Cache:

  With respect to the future of trustworthy systems and networks,
  perhaps the most important recommendations involve the urgent
  establishment and use of *soundly based, highly disciplined, and
  principle-driven architectures,* as well as *development practices
  that systematically encompass trustworthiness and assurance as
  integral parts of what must become coherent development processes
  and sound subsequent operational practices.*

I have done what I could to turn that principle into reality in the
Vinyl Cache project, and learned that *principle-driven architecture*
is not exactly a popular thing, when people "just need this one
quick hack…".

But it sure does pay in the long run:
As I write this, we have just announced
`VSV00019 <https://vinyl-cache.org/security/VSV00019.html>`_, and
while that is an utterly trivially visible bug, which we all totally
failed to spot in code-reviews, it is still only number nineteen,
over the twenty year lifetime of the project.

Thanks Peter!

*/phk*
