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>The time is way overdue for IT engineers to be subject to professional liability, like almost every other engineering profession. Before you tell me that is im
by mikewarot 4y ago
>The time is way overdue for IT engineers to be subject to professional liability, like almost every other engineering profession. Before you tell me that is impossible, please study how the very same thing happened with electricity, planes, cranes, trains, ships, automobiles, lifts, food processing, buildings, and, for that matter, driving a car.
How will that solve the problem? Even if we were able to agree on a profession, that people could read and sign on to, would it help?
Everything is build on sand. There are zero operating systems that can stand for a year without patching in the face of contact with the internet.
Blaming system administrators, programmers, or users isn't going to help fix the fundamental design flaw at the root of our software.
We need operating systems that are provably secure upon which to build the rest. Then we can apply the principle of least privilege, and a series of security policies to build upon that.
In the mean while, there is one fundamental tool which is under utilized, the data diode.[1] With such a device, it would be possible to monitor a system from the outside world (via the internet, etc.). A polling loop sends data out in a continuous manner (with forward error correction), and a matching server receives the data, checks for errors, an then makes it available to the outside world.
You can also use data diodes to allow submission of information from the world, without the danger of exfiltration. Such a system might have helped prevent the OPM breach of 2015 if the database were only allowed to be added, and never queried via network.[2]
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidirectional_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unidirectional_network
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management_data_breach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Personnel_Management...
- randomdata 4y ago> There are zero operating systems that can stand for a year without patching in the face of contact with the internet. Similarly, there are also zero buildings, bridges, aircraft, etc. that can realistically withstand attacks of humans despite being built by engineers who have taken on the liability. A sufficiently powerful bomb will win every time. It seems a bit strange to want to hold software to a higher standard here.
- mikewarot 4y ago>A sufficiently powerful bomb will win every time. It seems a bit strange to want to hold software to a higher standard here. A brick fortification built in the 1800s will always offer some defense from small arms fire. You can't cause that fort to attack all other nearby forts. The side effects of the fort are locally limited. A computer that allows unauthorized infiltration of command (not just denial of service) can be used as an offensive weapon by anyone (or any bot) anywhere. [Edit]It's like building your fort out of crates of explosives, instead of bricks.[/Edit] The side effects of a computer are not locally limited. I think it is only rational to require a standard appropriate with such a radically different set of side-effects.
- randomdata 4y ago> You can't cause that fort to attack all other nearby forts. Why not? Clever blast planning could send the shrapnel from one fort into another, seeing one fort carry out an attack on other forts. What motivated people can come up with is a complete unknown, and therefore incongruent with engineering, which requires a set of known and predictable states.
- bee_rider 4y agoI think this shows one of the weaknesses of the building analogy. Buildings might stand up to basic civilian attacks usually, but probably most aren't built to stay up in the face of the sort of things that a professional military can bring along -- artillery, etc. In software, where things can be copied essentially for free, there's no need to have a military industrial complex to mass produce artillery if you want to go around blowing things up. Tools from intelligence agencies leak, and then can be copied infinitely, eventually trickling down to script kiddies. There's a blurry line between intelligence services and criminal organizations in some countries. There's a blurry line between military spying and corporate espionage in others. A world where some teenager could buy nearly-current tanks from a guy their weed dealer knew would not have many tall buildings, I think.
- webmaven 4y ago> In the mean while, there is one fundamental tool which is under utilized, the data diode.[1] With such a device, it would be possible to monitor a system from the outside world (via the internet, etc.). A polling loop sends data out in a continuous manner (with forward error correction), and a matching server receives the data, checks for errors, an then makes it available to the outside world. Something like that was implemented at Amazon in the early days using a modified serial cable that prevented credit card information from ever exiting the payment system even if the web servers were compromised.
- mikewarot 4y agoI hope they've updated that system to use a data diode, instead of deciding it was too careful.