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>2.6. Paranoia is a Virtue</H1
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>The primary difficulty in writing secure programs is that
writing them requires a different mind-set, in short, a paranoid mind-set.
The reason is that the impact of errors (also called defects or bugs)
can be profoundly different.</P
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>Normal non-secure programs have many errors.
While these errors are undesirable, these errors usually
involve rare or unlikely situations, and if a user should stumble upon
one they will try to avoid using the tool that way in the future.</P
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>In secure programs, the situation is reversed.
Certain users will intentionally search out and cause rare or unlikely
situations, in the hope that such attacks will give them unwarranted privileges.
As a result, when writing secure programs, paranoia is a virtue.</P
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