Is your computer insecure?

Abstract

Sleepless nights face the data-processing manager who attempts to identify the many destructive fates that can await his computer center: fraud, hardware and software failures, operator errors, input errors, programming errors, magnetic erasure, electromagnetic and acoustic monitoring . . . Hardware and software techniques to prevent such disasters as leakage of private information, penetration of a computerized information center, and the alteration or destruction of a data base are surveyed in this article. Areas of concern include remote-terminal access, cryptography, the communication subsystem, threat monitoring, processing controls, certification, and the internal audit.