5 ms·
> maybe spend less time fleshing out offensive capabilities and more time on defense of your citizens? What do you mean? The US should invest in cyber defenses
by prvit 4y ago
> maybe spend less time fleshing out offensive capabilities and more time on defense of your citizens?
What do you mean? The US should invest in cyber defenses instead of fighter jets?
- Enginerrrd 4y agoNo it's just that the NSA used to work to make American companies more secure. Now they instead they find zero-days to then secretly exploit for as long as possible. It's gotten so bad, that their recommendations for crypto are regarded with a significant degree of skepticism because of past history of deliberately undermining crypto systems which is a Terrible state of things.
- lazide 4y agoThey do both, but right now the technology makes real defense (when you have real users) pretty much impossible. And not because of the NSA.
- _jal 4y agoThey do both, but it has been the case for a while that the NSA prioritizes offense. You can agree with that stance or not, but it is there, criticism on this point goes back at least a decade. I agree that the security environment is awful, but that doesn't excuse NSA making it worse.
- prvit 4y agoOf course NSA prioritises offense when it provides a vastly greater RoI.
- lazide 4y agoAlso, outside of SCIF environments (which do get prioritized), there isn’t a whole lot that is feasible for DOD or other gov’t agencies to do while still using civilian technology or working habits, which they don’t really have an option on right now. The whole industry and economy needs to be upleveled software wise in a lot of ways for meaningfully better security to be economically possible. Typically that requires a serious crisis and/or war. Hopefully not the case here.
- _jal 4y ago> provides a vastly greater RoI Of course it does. Thinking about it in terms of ROI doesn't consider externalities. When the OPM gets hacked, nobody at the NSA worries about their budget. Reason #7893 "run government like a business" is a self-describing category error.
- lazide 4y agoeveryone uses ROI calculations somewhere (just not necessarily using cash as the return metric) or they are flying blind. The underlying issue is that large organizations have low trust (some worse than others!), and therefore large organizations tend to coarse numeric metrics, and game those metrics to look better, which makes even more low trust (and hence backstabbing, empire building, etc.) between divisions. As a reaction, leadership also tends to err towards coarse, harder to game metrics (like ‘reduce breaches by xx%’ rather than relying on judgement and trust like ‘ensure we don’t have an unreasonable number of breaches, and work to reduce them in the ecosystem’. Which of course provides strong incentives for chasing the number by throwing all the babies out with the bathwater, and often making the real problem worse. It’s a size of the organization problem. Changing metrics/mission will shuffle up the specific babies being thrown out, and what is considered the bath water, but the underlying problem remains. Solid, consistent leadership makes the problem better. That tends to be expensive and not want to deal with the political BS common in Gov’t, at least in the US.
- prvit 4y agoIt seems to be that $100B spent by NSA on offensive operations will reap far greater security benefits than spending $100B “to make American companies more (cyber)secure”. Knowing what your adversaries are up to is invaluable.
- ynbkc 4y agoHere’s one concern highlighting the value of broad defenses. A targeted software-based attack may trigger supply chain disruptions with significant (even if only short-term) impacts. If combined / coordinated, multi-billion dollar disruption is within reach.
- ynbkc 4y agoCan you please share a source? This isn’t laziness. I know I can search — and I will —- but I cannot know what sources _you_ are intending, which provides context.
- Enginerrrd 4y agoI did have some things in mind but, to save me a bit of time, are there any particular claims you're looking to source?
- ynbkc 4y agoSure, thanks > No it's just that the NSA used to work to make American companies more secure 1. I'm interested in that history; e.g. how it came about and how it worked. 2. Evidence that this is no longer (or less of) a goal: policy, internal priorities, spending? Congressional testimony, legislation, or guidance? Leaks?
- bob1029 4y ago> their recommendations for crypto are regarded with a significant degree of skepticism Indeed. Once you start talking about magical constants and extremely convoluted math concepts... that's zero trust in my book. Integer factorization is a grade school concept in most developed nations. The edge cases are far more obvious than with something like ECC, which has entire classes of no-good constants that would require a PhD in math to fully grok.
- Godel_unicode 4y agoPrime factorization is one of the great unsolved problems in mathematics and if you can solve it there is a million dollar prize with your name on it. There are all kinds of issues with implementing crypto safely on top of it (google “Fermat factorization”), some related to bad constants. Being well known doesn’t make the math easy.