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Your comment got me thinking, Apple probably was already buying large blocks of pentest time, and the comments in the thread make it seem like these were obviou
by egsmi 6y ago
Your comment got me thinking, Apple probably was already buying large blocks of pentest time, and the comments in the thread make it seem like these were obvious flaws. Is that right? If we assume Apple already had a contracted pentest firm, can you speculate why didn't they find these flaws?
- tptacek 6y agoI don't know what "obvious flaws" means. I know from like a dozen years of consulting experience, and from 10 years of vuln research prior to that, that putting a different set of eyes on a target tends to get you a different set of bugs. Finding vulnerabilities is as much an art as a science, which makes sense when you think about what hunting for software vulnerabilities actually entails. If you could do it deterministically, you'd be saying something big about computer science. I think we're on firmer ground saying that there are ways of delivering software that foreclose on "obvious bugs". But when we talk about fundamentally changing the way we deliver software --- in secure-by-default development environments, on secure-by-default deployment platforms, with security as a primary functional goal prioritized over time-to-market --- we're actually into real money now, not just another $250k on pentesters.