Thanks for that! :) The funny thing is that I put trailing slashes in there because that's how the Slashdot advice said to do it: "(markuptag here) will auto-link a URL." It had a trailing slash in the URL. Those darned documentation writers...

"The FedRAMP security assessment process defines a set of controls for low and moderate impact level systems based on NIST SP 800-53 controls." (FedRAMP Website) The key words here are "for LOW AND MODERATE impact level systems." Low and medium robustness are what the government usually accepts. All kinds of stuff that was routinely compromised fits that profile too. The Shapiro [1] paper on the Window's EAL4 evaluation illustrated why it actually meant "certified insecure" and sadly still applies to this one. At least the NIST standard has plenty of useful controls to keep out the riff raff attackers. The EAL7 or Orange Book A1 certification are very rigorous security standards. So few products reached that level that I could fit many of their names in a single tweet (97 characters actually). Cygnacom has a nice breakdown [2] of the assurance levels and extra work that must be done to verify the entire lifecycle to reach something resembling secure. Such solutions look... nothing like Azure. And Azure was neither built on such standards nor evaluated to one. It's not secure. QED. Nick P, Security Engineer, schneier.com contributer 1. http://www.eros-os.org/~shap/NT-EAL4.html/ 2. http://www.cygnacom.com/labs/cc_assurance_index/CCinHTML/PART3/PART36.HTM/ (Note: I originally posted this comment in the wrong spot. Reposting it here. Rarely use this comment system so my bad.)

"The FedRAMP security assessment process defines a set of controls for low and moderate impact level systems based on NIST SP 800-53 controls." (FedRAMP Website) The key words here are "for LOW AND MODERATE impact level systems." Low and medium robustness are what the government usually accepts. All kinds of stuff that was routinely compromised fits that profile too. The Shapiro [1] paper on the Window's EAL4 evaluation illustrated why it actually meant "certified insecure" and sadly still applies to this one. At least the NIST standard has plenty of useful controls to keep out the riff raff attackers. The EAL7 or Orange Book A1 certification are very rigorous security standards. So few products reached that level that I could fit many of their names in a single tweet (97 characters actually). Cygnacom has a nice breakdown [2] of the assurance levels and extra work that must be done to verify the entire lifecycle to reach something resembling secure. Such solutions look... nothing like Azure. And Azure was neither built on such standards nor evaluated to one. It's not secure. QED. Nick P, Security Engineer, schneier.com contributer 1. http://www.eros-os.org/~shap/NT-EAL4.html/ 2. http://www.cygnacom.com/labs/cc_assurance_index/CCinHTML/PART3/PART36.HTM/

Use Foxit and keep javascript off by default. (Or don't even install the JavaScript plugin.) It's lightweight, fast and has fewer quality issues than adobe. Additionally, considering PDF is inherently an unsafe format, I'd say adding a sandbox like Sandboxie can help you. More technical people here might try porting a good PDF reader's key parsing and JS functionality to NaCl sandboxing system. Put each component in separate partitions with inner sandbox protection at a minimum. That lets us use the fast and legacy native code, but have plenty isolation almost for free. Nick P Security Engineer usually on schneier.com

Re: "run it on a RAM sled with between 128 GB and 512 GB of memory" Google gave me absolutely nothing on RAM sleds. I've used RAM disks for years and even know of hard disk's that are flash-backed RAM for performance. 128GB-512GB of RAM? If I needed that in a server, SGI (rip) and others have it. I doubt that's what they mean, though, as it's expensive custom stuff. So, what is a RAM sled? And where are they bought or how are they set up? Thanks ahead of time for any answers.