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So what do we do? Just admit that it's all doomed forever? Perhaps the only question left at that point would be exactly what even needs to be blue and red team

So what do we do? Just admit that it's all doomed forever? Perhaps the only question left at that point would be exactly what even needs to be blue and red team'd. In other words what is worth using at the risk of being abused. If you also assume infinite extent, then nothing is worth it because everything can cause harm. Otherwise, we actually do learn ways to converge towards more generally secure systems. Safer programming languages and safer hardware will lead the way, but it seems much slower this round than the stories we hear about the origins of everything.

Veserv 5y ago
No, we just need systems 100-1000x better than prevailing commercial IT systems. Systems that do not quake in their boots at the thought of a single dedicated hacker, but are designed and expected to resist competent teams of tens or hundreds working full time for years since that is what is needed to reach basic parity. However, we will not find those techniques by following the standard commercial IT methodologies which were not designed for such a task. Just ask any architect of these systems if they could stop a team of 10 people working full time for 3 years. If even the people making it think it is absurd to defend against such a minimal effort there is no chance it is actually adequate. In fact, there is little reason to assume that the methodologies that can only get 0.1% of the way to solving the problem despite decades of work and tens of billions of dollars will ever converge to an adequate solution. It could be like trying to use the knowledge of horse buggy makers to determine how to make a machine faster than the speed of sound. And even if it could eventually get there it would require 100% improvements year over year for an entire decade to get there from existing commercial methodologies. No, it is far more reasonable to use systems that were actually designed for these environments and have actually demonstrated success, such as systems certified to Orange Book A1, and make them more practical since, as everybody knows, it is far easier to make a cheap, working design by starting with something that works and making it cheap than starting with cheap components and figuring out how to make something that works. As for how you can identify proven success you can just start with a $1 million red team exercise. If they are able to find any material defects that means that there are likely many such defects and your processes can not prevent the occurrence of such trivial flaws and needs to be rethought. Only when there are zero material defects are you at the starting line. Note that this is not an exhaustive test, rather it should be treated like the fizzbuzz of security design, a trivial softball to weed out the the people that know nothing and the systems that do not work.
- ddingus 5y ago
  An Apollo program for information systems? This isn't a bad idea.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    Apollo isn't what I'd compare this to. There were a lot of near misses and there was of course one really big fail (the aftermath of which strengthened its quality culture a lot) It's not as if this was some kind of profound rock-solid architectural effort from the start. It was a race and speed was of the essence. In many ways it has a lot in common with information science today. A high speed of innovation. Go fast and break things. High risk high reward. I think the parent was advocating doing the opposite. Going for rock-solid and secure. Set security design standards that are mandatory. The same way that we have a building code. Good idea really but development speed and features will suffer. It'll be a big change for an industry that's totally not set up for that. I doubt many consumers will be happy either, no more huge spec improvements every year or fancy new features to show off. And it's not all tech either. Right now the main technique of ingress is phishing and opsec weaknesses. A mindset change is needed, not just for the tech community but everyone. It'll happen but it'll take years, maybe decades. And we'll have our own "Apollo 1"s to underline the importance and keep us on track. And we already had. It was WannaCry that started the awareness process.
    - ddingus 5y ago
      >think the parent was advocating doing the opposite. Going for rock-solid and secure. That is the part of Apollo I was thinking about. Done right, the humans get back to earth... Here, done right, the data stays where it should be and the systems do what they are intended to do. The people don't get notices... And, like Apollo, lots of that would trickle out into industry and eventually down to ordinary people. >Right now the main technique of ingress is phishing and opsec weaknesses. A mindset change is needed, not just for the tech community but everyone. I am well aware. Seems solvable given a consistent culture and norms can be established, eventually polished and time tested, production proven.
- 5y ago
kibwen 5y ago
> Just admit that it's all doomed forever? No, because ultimately security isn't binary. If you can increase the cost to the attacker, that raises the bar for attacking you and reduces the number of potential attackers. And over time security practices do get generally better, raising the tide for all boats; the problems right now are that we're still wrestling with the legacy of foundational systems designed in a pre-internet world where constant adversarial networking was not the norm, and more generally we keep increasing the attack surface by adding new things to the network. But once we have software/hardware stacks that have all been designed in a post-internet world (yeah, it'll take a while) and once we've finished networking everything that could reasonably be networked, there's hope enough to suspect that it will be possible to close the security gap to all but the most determined adversaries.
- nixpulvis 5y ago
  > once we've finished networking everything that could reasonably be networked I highly doubt we'll come to terms on this one.

Veserv 5y ago

No, we just need systems 100-1000x better than prevailing commercial IT systems. Systems that do not quake in their boots at the thought of a single dedicated hacker, but are designed and expected to resist competent teams of tens or hundreds working full time for years since that is what is needed to reach basic parity. However, we will not find those techniques by following the standard commercial IT methodologies which were not designed for such a task. Just ask any architect of these systems if they could stop a team of 10 people working full time for 3 years. If even the people making it think it is absurd to defend against such a minimal effort there is no chance it is actually adequate. In fact, there is little reason to assume that the methodologies that can only get 0.1% of the way to solving the problem despite decades of work and tens of billions of dollars will ever converge to an adequate solution. It could be like trying to use the knowledge of horse buggy makers to determine how to make a machine faster than the speed of sound. And even if it could eventually get there it would require 100% improvements year over year for an entire decade to get there from existing commercial methodologies. No, it is far more reasonable to use systems that were actually designed for these environments and have actually demonstrated success, such as systems certified to Orange Book A1, and make them more practical since, as everybody knows, it is far easier to make a cheap, working design by starting with something that works and making it cheap than starting with cheap components and figuring out how to make something that works. As for how you can identify proven success you can just start with a $1 million red team exercise. If they are able to find any material defects that means that there are likely many such defects and your processes can not prevent the occurrence of such trivial flaws and needs to be rethought. Only when there are zero material defects are you at the starting line. Note that this is not an exhaustive test, rather it should be treated like the fizzbuzz of security design, a trivial softball to weed out the the people that know nothing and the systems that do not work.

ddingus 5y ago
An Apollo program for information systems? This isn't a bad idea.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  Apollo isn't what I'd compare this to. There were a lot of near misses and there was of course one really big fail (the aftermath of which strengthened its quality culture a lot) It's not as if this was some kind of profound rock-solid architectural effort from the start. It was a race and speed was of the essence. In many ways it has a lot in common with information science today. A high speed of innovation. Go fast and break things. High risk high reward. I think the parent was advocating doing the opposite. Going for rock-solid and secure. Set security design standards that are mandatory. The same way that we have a building code. Good idea really but development speed and features will suffer. It'll be a big change for an industry that's totally not set up for that. I doubt many consumers will be happy either, no more huge spec improvements every year or fancy new features to show off. And it's not all tech either. Right now the main technique of ingress is phishing and opsec weaknesses. A mindset change is needed, not just for the tech community but everyone. It'll happen but it'll take years, maybe decades. And we'll have our own "Apollo 1"s to underline the importance and keep us on track. And we already had. It was WannaCry that started the awareness process.
  - ddingus 5y ago
    >think the parent was advocating doing the opposite. Going for rock-solid and secure. That is the part of Apollo I was thinking about. Done right, the humans get back to earth... Here, done right, the data stays where it should be and the systems do what they are intended to do. The people don't get notices... And, like Apollo, lots of that would trickle out into industry and eventually down to ordinary people. >Right now the main technique of ingress is phishing and opsec weaknesses. A mindset change is needed, not just for the tech community but everyone. I am well aware. Seems solvable given a consistent culture and norms can be established, eventually polished and time tested, production proven.
5y ago

kibwen 5y ago

> Just admit that it's all doomed forever? No, because ultimately security isn't binary. If you can increase the cost to the attacker, that raises the bar for attacking you and reduces the number of potential attackers. And over time security practices do get generally better, raising the tide for all boats; the problems right now are that we're still wrestling with the legacy of foundational systems designed in a pre-internet world where constant adversarial networking was not the norm, and more generally we keep increasing the attack surface by adding new things to the network. But once we have software/hardware stacks that have all been designed in a post-internet world (yeah, it'll take a while) and once we've finished networking everything that could reasonably be networked, there's hope enough to suspect that it will be possible to close the security gap to all but the most determined adversaries.

nixpulvis 5y ago
> once we've finished networking everything that could reasonably be networked I highly doubt we'll come to terms on this one.