El Reg just reported a major cross-platform flaw in 30 of Symantec’s security products, including Norton AntiVirus 2004, corporate anti-virus apps and Brightmail spam filters. Of course the root cause is a system architecture which is so broken that it requires the use of antivirus software that is so tightly integrated that it becomes a potential source of compromise.
I’ve always thought that I understood the history – or at least the mythology – of how this came about. Cutler and crew knew (from their VMS days) how to make NT secure, but chip support, backward compatibility and performance “optimizations” did them in. They could have used Win31/DOS VMs to cope with the legacy crud, but it wouldn’t have been fast enough. We’re all living with the results today (even if we don’t run Windows.)
I wonder how close this mythology is to reality….