In February of 1676 Sir Issac Newton wrote in a letter to Robert Hooke “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” implying that while he may have come up with the final idea he was only able to do so because of the work of those that had gone before him.
Weld Pond (Chris Wysopal) accurately points out that this also applies to security researchers. Seldom is a major security flaw discovered that isn’t related to the previous work of an older technology. His case in point is the recent flaw patched by Microsoft of a almost decade old vulnerability. The original vulnerability has been widely credited to Sir Dystic (Josh Buchbinder) but Dystic’s research was based in part on work by DilDog (Christien Rioux). Dildog wasn’t the first to find the flaw either as it was mentioned in a earlier paper by Dominique Brezinski. Weld argues that this is why credit for security research is so important.
On a completely unrelated note Mudge (Peiter Zatko) was recently quoted by Mass High Tech (again) on the subject of voting machine security.