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In the notes for my Computer Security course, the lecturer refers to the "Australian Failure" on slide 19. I'm assuming he's referring to a well known security system failure, but I can't find what it is, does anyone know what he's talking about?

fredley
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    This is a well-known, common *Information Security Problem* that is similar to other problems with Australians, such as their eating and drinking habits.

    For example, have you ever tasted Foster's Lager? According to the commercials, "It's Australian for Beer". I would rather drink my cat's piss than this horrid stuff!

    To relate back to the original topic, Australian people are kind and gentle people -- until they become Information Security Professionals. Then, they are crude, crass, full of themselves, and total and complete egomaniacs.

    Of course, they're only half as bad as Ame

     – atdre Apr 05 '11 at 20:01
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    Come to think of it, perhaps the original author of this question meant, "The Austrian Failure", in which case he is referring to Austrian School of Risk Management. Libertarian infosec professionals in the United States believe that Democrats and Republicans (and bankers) are stealing all of the money out of this country, but their fix for the problem is to give all of the money to wealthy non-politicians and non-bankers. They even think we should cut social programs in order to provide more money to these people. And guns -- lots of guns. – atdre Apr 05 '11 at 20:11
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    :-) made me laugh - but I'm still going to convert it to a comment – Rory Alsop Apr 05 '11 at 21:02
  • Why don't you ask someone else who attended class that day? Or if you had a legitimate reason to miss class, ask your lecturer? This doesn't seem like a suitable question for this web site. – D.W. Apr 06 '11 at 01:36
  • Hmmm - Cambridge... Ross Anderson... Multi-level security, "Australian Failure"... We'll get to the bottom of this yet! Headed down under.... – nealmcb Jun 07 '11 at 00:01

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An entry like that is probably a speaking point for the presenter. I'd put something like that there if I knew of a case where a multi-level security system that related to information classification had a notable failure... in Australia.

But it's not a well-known name for any failure, and I've tried a few variations of http://www.google.com/search?q=%22australian+failure%22+security with no apparent hope of getting anything other than the slides in question.

Given the location in the presentation and the topic of that section, I'd say it's not a well-known vulnerability. It's probably a specific implementation failure example. You just don't really run into much that does that kind of classified handling outside of places that play with governments. Security there is a different world.

Jeff Ferland
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