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Yes. Vulnerabilities exist with respect to a system's expected functionality and must be understood and weighed against other requirements to determine the syst
by czx4f4bd 4y ago
Yes. Vulnerabilities exist with respect to a system's expected functionality and must be understood and weighed against other requirements to determine the system's security model. Even if you think the expected functionality is stupid or impossible, that doesn't change the fact that the system has a particular expectation that it doesn't meet and a mechanism by which that expectation can be violated, i.e. a vulnerability.
To put it another way, consider physical locks, which must inherently be able to resist direct physical tampering by an adversary. Under your definition, no flaw in a lock could be considered a vulnerability since any lock can eventually be cracked. The problem is that this doesn't provide us any useful insight, it just makes the word "vulnerability" useless. It's already well-known that any lock can eventually be cracked, but tradeoffs still have to be made in deciding which lock to use for a certain situation.
- josephcsible 4y agoNo lock is expected to be able to keep an adversary out indefinitely, since that's known to be completely impossible. They're expected to delay an adversary by a given amount of time, e.g., 2 hours for a UL class 3 vault door lock, and a vulnerability is if there's a way for an adversary to bypass one faster than that. The problem with a security model that relies on people never being able to root devices they possess is that it is expecting the impossible.