“When will we be secure? Nobody knows for sure – but it cannot happen before commercial security products and services possess not only enough functionality to satisfy customers’ stated needs, but also sufficient assurance of quality, reliability, safety, and appropriateness for use. Such assurances are lacking in most of today’s commercial security products and services.”

Brian Snow, Former Technical Director of the US National Security Agency (NSA), "We need Assurance", 2005

“Given today’s common hardware and software architectural paradigms, operating systems security is a major primitive for secure systems – you will not succeed without it. This area is so important that it needs all the emphasis it can get. It is the current ‘black hole’ of security.”

Brian Snow, Former Technical Director of the US National Security Agency (NSA), "We need assurance!", 1999-2008

“So the threat to cryptography is well understood due to work by Peter Shor and others. A symmetric algorithm like AES or others standard crypto processes is cut (of) key-size in half, which is a dramatic reduction. ... For key management purposes, against the RSA and the Diffie-Hellman and stuff, they flat-line under a quantum computer.”

Brian Snow, Former Technical Director of the US National Security Agency (NSA), Public Key Cryptography 30th Anniversary Conference, Dec 2006