The trivial answer comming in mind immediatly is:
Secure software is one which never crashes.
That's pretty simple. Is'nt it ? But - what is a "crash", what means "never" ? "Crash" often associated with the well-known "Blue-Screen". Or with the Segmentation Fault. The program is gone away after that, it disappeared. That's the same if I click on "Exit" in a menu, which is no special thing. Well, it is not exactly the same, the further is not intended, where the latter is. So, is a "crash" the situation that a software stops doing what I want ? That description would match another observation of "crash": The program doesn't respond, the famous endless-loop. At this case, the software still exist, and it does something as well, but either it does not the thing I want, or it does it far too much.
First conclusion: a secure software is one that always do what I want, and so many times I want.
The bad thing is, that I not always now what I should want. In many situations the software must tell me about my possibilities, so that I can think about what I want. Some software is very smart: it belives that it knows what I want and does that in advance, to spare time and stupid questions (from the stupid user). Now - how can a software never crash, because it does exactly what I want all the time, if I don't know what I want or if I can't tell that poor little thing what I want ? May be I don't know what I should want to achive my goal to create something great, may be I don't know the full consequences if I want this or that ?
Second conclusion: a secure software is one that always do what I want, and so many times I want, and it never let come up any doubt what I should want to achieve my goal.
That sounds great ! But to be honest - the crash or frozen software is not the real bad thing. The real bad, evil catastrophe is that the data are killed ! That's the real reason why I would like to get a sledge hammer if faced to such a situation.....That hurts. Blue Screen or Segmentation Fault often result in bad, corrupted or even lost data. And frozen software is very good to prevent me from saving my work done in many hours. From this point of view, secure software is something which never damage my data in that sense, that they lost their value, their integrety or that they can not be processed further. Either the software can do what I want for all my data, or it never touch them at all.
Final conclusion: a secure software is one that always do what I want, and so many times I want, and which never let come up any doubt what I should want, and which do what I want for exact all my data completely or never touch them at all.
Isn't it a great result ? But it's not all. More to come later.
