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I hope it's beginning to sink in to corporate America: you need to get serious about security. Go Linux. Hire many permanent security experts with continuous au

I hope it's beginning to sink in to corporate America: you need to get serious about security. Go Linux. Hire many permanent security experts with continuous audit processes. Acknowledge the true cost of IT.

7373737373 5y ago
Rather, go microkernels! (Recursive) sandboxing and resource control have to become a thing: https://genode.org/documentation/general-overview/index https://genode.org/documentation/general-overview/index Permissions should be able to be set in a fine grained way, capability security needs to become much more well known: https://github.com/void4/notes/issues/41 https://github.com/void4/notes/issues/41
- tibbydudeza 5y ago
  Probably their plants has some industrial equipment that is still running on Windows 2000.
  - reilly3000 5y ago
    Absolutely. Plenty of America runs on EOL Windows XP legacy apps that have been too complicated to migrate. Sometimes they run airgapped until someone realizes that isn’t practical. CEOs must demand better and be willing to pay for it. Without leadership support these migrations almost always fail.
    - 7373737373 5y ago
      And (operating) system and programming language designers must make security a foundational property of their systems. Most modern languages will never be secure, because their semantics necessitate things like global names. Trying to graft security extensions onto an existing language that wasn't built with them in mind will be painstaking and will always lag behind and is thus often abandoned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caja_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caja_project
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
Linux vs. Windows makes very little difference here.
- elihu 5y ago
  Or perhaps the choice makes a difference, but neither is sufficiently secure. Both likely have dozens if not hundreds of undiscovered array-out-of-bounds errors, stack overruns, and race conditions, some of which may have security implications. I don't think that "re-write everything in Rust" is the final solution in terms of security, but in terms of something like the Linux kernel one can at least see how such a (difficult and unlikely) project might at least address many of the low-hanging fruit so developers can shift their focus to fixing higher-level vulnerabilities.
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
    The risk of kernel exploits isn't the main threat. The complete lack of meaningful sandboxing is a much bigger problem. Most applications need to be able to read: - files that the user drops into them or opens through a file picker (which could be OS-controlled, giving access to only the selected file) - their own storage/config directories - read-only system libraries - temp files (again, isolated per app) Just moving everything into this model would already go a long way. We see kernel exploits on phones because you need them to bypass the sandboxing. We don't see them often on computers, because why would attackers bother?
    - elihu 5y ago
      I can agree with that; writing applications the same way we did on 1980's Unix systems is no longer a sensible way of doing things, and I really wish there was some momentum around fixing that too.
swiley 5y ago
> corporate America: you need to get serious about security. USE OF MCAFFE INTENSIFIES

7373737373 5y ago

Rather, go microkernels! (Recursive) sandboxing and resource control have to become a thing: https://genode.org/documentation/general-overview/index https://genode.org/documentation/general-overview/index Permissions should be able to be set in a fine grained way, capability security needs to become much more well known: https://github.com/void4/notes/issues/41 https://github.com/void4/notes/issues/41

tibbydudeza 5y ago
Probably their plants has some industrial equipment that is still running on Windows 2000.
- reilly3000 5y ago
  Absolutely. Plenty of America runs on EOL Windows XP legacy apps that have been too complicated to migrate. Sometimes they run airgapped until someone realizes that isn’t practical. CEOs must demand better and be willing to pay for it. Without leadership support these migrations almost always fail.
  - 7373737373 5y ago
    And (operating) system and programming language designers must make security a foundational property of their systems. Most modern languages will never be secure, because their semantics necessitate things like global names. Trying to graft security extensions onto an existing language that wasn't built with them in mind will be painstaking and will always lag behind and is thus often abandoned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caja_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caja_project

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago

Linux vs. Windows makes very little difference here.

elihu 5y ago
Or perhaps the choice makes a difference, but neither is sufficiently secure. Both likely have dozens if not hundreds of undiscovered array-out-of-bounds errors, stack overruns, and race conditions, some of which may have security implications. I don't think that "re-write everything in Rust" is the final solution in terms of security, but in terms of something like the Linux kernel one can at least see how such a (difficult and unlikely) project might at least address many of the low-hanging fruit so developers can shift their focus to fixing higher-level vulnerabilities.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
  The risk of kernel exploits isn't the main threat. The complete lack of meaningful sandboxing is a much bigger problem. Most applications need to be able to read: - files that the user drops into them or opens through a file picker (which could be OS-controlled, giving access to only the selected file) - their own storage/config directories - read-only system libraries - temp files (again, isolated per app) Just moving everything into this model would already go a long way. We see kernel exploits on phones because you need them to bypass the sandboxing. We don't see them often on computers, because why would attackers bother?
  - elihu 5y ago
    I can agree with that; writing applications the same way we did on 1980's Unix systems is no longer a sensible way of doing things, and I really wish there was some momentum around fixing that too.

swiley 5y ago

> corporate America: you need to get serious about security. USE OF MCAFFE INTENSIFIES