Bickering In-Depth: Rethinking the Composition of Competing Security Systems

A vast array of security software exists, and because most of it addresses only relatively small facets of information security, it remains unclear how users should compose such software to achieve a reasonable degree of protection coverage. Furthermore, the many companies, organizations, and individuals that create such software don\´t design it to cooperate with similar software. We believe the resulting level of competition for resources and measurement points (kernel, library, or user hooks; disk access events; the system call API; and so on) can unnecessarily degrade system performance and interfere with the efficacy of the systems themselves. In essence, the broad call for "defense in-depth" can exacerbate existing performance and usability problems and lead to an unintentional loss of security. We suggest a paradigm in which security programmers intentionally design their code to cooperate with similar software by negotiating over security-critical resources, system measurement points, event types, and trusted information flow paths.