The Halting Problems of Network Stack Insecurity

Everyday computer insecurity has only gotten worse, even after many years of concerted effort . We must be missing some fundamental yet easily applicable insights into why some designs cannot be secured, how to avoid investing in them and re-creating them, and why some result in less insecurity than others . We posit that by treating valid or expected inputs to programs and network protocol stacks as input languages that must be simple to parse we can immensely improve security . We posit that the opposite is also true: a system whose valid or expected inputs cannot be simply parsed cannot in practice be made secure.