Tuesday, January 11, 2005

French security researcher facing jail

According to this ZDNet report, a French security researcher, Guillaume Tena, is facing a jail sentence for finding and publishing flaws in Viguard antivirus software. The software vendor have sued him for intellectual property infringement and want him jailed and financial damages.

"Accoridng to Tena's Web site, his research "showed how the program worked, demonstrated a few security flaws and carried out some tests with real viruses. Unlike the advertising claimed, this software didn't detect and stop ?100 percent of viruses?."

Tena, who is currently a researcher for Harvard University in Massachusetts, said that Tegam responded in a "weird way" by first branding him a terrorist and then filing a formal complaint in Paris. During the resulting tribunal, Tena said the judge decided that because the published exploits included some re-engineered source code from Viguard?s software, he had violated French copyright laws...

On Tena's Web site, he claims that If independent researchers are not allowed to freely publish their findings about security software then users will be only have "marketing press releases" to assess the quality of the software. "Unfortunately, it seems that we are heading this way in France and maybe in Europe," Tena said.

"To use an analogy, it's a little bit as if Ford was selling cars with defective brakes. If I realised that there was a problem, opened the hood and took a few pictures to prove it, and published everything on my Web site. Then Ford could file a complaint against me," added Tena."

Without being privy to all the detailed facts of the case it not possible to assess it in its entirety. However, the notion of jailing someone who points out that someone is selling something that doesn't do want the vendor claims is ridiculous.

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