Mirror, Mirror: Using Self-Protection to Boost App Security

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Last week while reading to my toddler, I came across the story of “Snow White,” in which the evil queen consults a magic mirror to find her greatest threat, the fairest person in the land. While my kid fell asleep — probably due to my effective storytelling technique — I kept thinking about why the queen would want to identify that threat. The answer, of course, is self-protection from anything that might dethrone her.

Then I began to think about what mechanism the mirror might use to compile and analyze a list of the fairest people in the land. If we think in security terms, the mirror was using runtime analytics to prioritize the threats and track down the fairest of them all.

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