Randomizing snake-oil

I was told by a Dec guy was that the original story was that with the right assumptions you could make anything provably secure and then showed how it could be done with the VMS system. You basically start by assuming all sorts of things like not having an active attacker, a set of actions that the system will only do, dropping down all the hardware to the bare minimum etc etc. All of these are things that various "provable" had used in one set or another.. so why not put them all together. You basically had a brick with VMS installed on it, but it was provable that it was secure within the parameters that could be used.

The problem was that the joke got out hand as someone took it seriously and started passing around about how VMS was superior to Unix because it was provably secure.

How true this story is versus all the others... I don't know.