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Ceremonial security and cargo cults
- voz_ 4y agoAn essay without a thesis? The topic seems interesting, but I am not sure what the author wanted me to get out of this.
- viraptor 4y agoApply the "How to remedy" steps where you see the ceremony going too far?
- ggm 4y agoCeremonial Security of another form is Key Ceremonies with HSM. They are "why should I trust this Trust Anchor" stuff. Highly ritualised behaviour, but it can be very important for public trust.
- userbinator 4y agoI believe that such dogmatic "thinking" (if one can call it that) exists and propagates only because people are being discouraged from thinking critically. They are instead encouraged to find "best practices" and "solutions" from others (often giving them $$$), which they can blindly follow, instead of evaluating their unique circumstances and thinking independently about their own needs. The constant use of "security" as an excuse or thought-terminating cliche, because it and similar FUD seems to have such a strong persuasive effect to those uninitiated unthinkers, doesn't help either.
- ta8645 4y agoNo offense, but I think you're exactly wrong. People need to trust the science, so to speak, and leave the thinking to domain experts who can dictate the best course of action for everyone. On their own, too many people are prone to following misinformation, and can't even be trusted to read both sides of any given argument critically. If the last few years hasn't taught us this lesson, what has it taught us?
- lynx23 4y agoIt has taught us that media distorts scientific information on demand. I am generally on your side, however, my lesson in the last years is that the communication channels can not be trusted, therefore I can no longer blindly trust what science supposedly tells me.
- bombolo 4y agoAlso scientists distort scientific information. I was recently arguing with a vegan about how healthy it really is to be vegan, and I sent a german paper that tested 75 people and found a generic lack of iron absorption. The other person said 75 is too small size, and sent me a literature review that claimed that iron absorption in vegans is fine. The only source for that claim in the literature review was the same paper I had originally sent. So the authors of the literature review just quoted a paper, completely changed the original conclusions, and got it approved. If we were serious about science, they should all face punishment for even attempting this. But they knew that at worst their paper would be rejected.
- lynx23 4y agoIt is similar to what happens with teachers where I come from. Once you managed to obtain the status of "teacher", it is virtually impossible to loose it again, no matter how bad your teaching is. Apparently, something similar is going on with scientists, and a few other professions. There is no mechanism in place to get rid of bad apples, because society thinks it would be unfair to remove someone from a job where they had to go thru considerable training to actually get it.
- arp242 4y agoShould we have trusted the experts on satanic ritual abuse in the 80s and 90s? I have many gripes with this attitude; experts can be wrong and even entire fields can be wrong. The satanic ritual abuse is a particularly egregious example with many "experts" mouthing off complete nonsense, but also see e.g. the replication crisis. And which expert do you believe? There are many expert. "You've got to ask the right expert" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lADB9Qu53CY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lADB9Qu53CY Remember all the "experts" that told us that asbestos and smoking was harmless? Or the "experts" that told us climate change wasn't real? Later turned out that this was just industry FUD/lies. Experts view things from their expertise. That's great, but many scenarios extend beyond one expertise and involve trade-offs, and can't be viewed purely through one lens. Now, I'm not so arrogant to think that "I know better than the experts"; in many cases I don't, but to always just "believe the experts" seems naïve.
- yawnxyz 4y agoThis is an interesting article that puts words into what I've been feeling and observing for a long time — at first the transition into Academia from tech felt this way (e.g. wow everyone's programmed to follow the PhD track!) to moving to Australia (wow everyone's so rule abiding and pattern matching; anyone who's attempting to "lead" gets cut down; there's even a term here for it called "tall poppy syndrome) But lately with all the layoffs it's kind of put a spotlight on tech startups and VCs. These are the smartest group of people who are supposed to escape mimetic behavior... but how do you explain all the VCs investing in me-too scooter companies or BNPL companies or yet-another-meal/grocery-delivery-service, who are now all absolutely wrecked by higher interest rates because these can only really thrive (or even survive) in low to no-interest rate environments? Why would these ever be $1B+ companies in the first place?? Sorry for the rant, it's just that the more you look, the more even the "smartest people in the room" are just performing rituals and it's disheartening and depressing.
- lynx23 4y agoThank you, I've just learnt something this morning, almost before the first sip of coffee... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dgb23 4y agoWe tend to learn through imitation more than we think. Humans lean on Theory of Mind: when we see others do a task we assume that it’s the right way of doing things, so we adopt their incantations. Generally this is not something that should be disheartening. It’s an incredibly efficient learning method that spreads cultural advancements quickly. Have you ever tried to train a dog? They try to understand you, but they don’t imitate. You have to meticulously motivate them through each step of a behavior and mark it consistently with commands. It’s fun, but requires a lot of patience. With humans you can just demonstrate something and they can imitate complex workflows in just a session or two. The master said to the apprentice: “I’ll only show you this once, so watch carefully!”
- 4y ago
- mkl95 4y agoA manager once asked me to rewrite a bunch of tests written by some former employee, because a security tool was complaining about hardcoded credentials. My guess is that he wanted to satisfy some OKR about how many security issues reported by that tool had been "fixed". Probably the most ridiculous thing I've done.
- beardedwizard 4y agoSo you think hard coding credentials, or other variables for that matter, is a good idea?
- astrange 4y agoIf those were unit tests they weren't real credentials.
- manicdee 4y agoHow do you test the rules about passwords containing at least one uppercase letter, one number and one special character if you don’t test with passwords that definitely do not contain those characters?
- mkl95 4y agoI don't think it's a bad or good idea, it depends. In that case they were harmless. For comparison, some people shared passwords on Slack and email in plain text.
- chunkyks 4y agoMy current title at work includes the words "software" and "engineer", and thus I have a natural mutual predator-prey relationship with infosec and compliance/IA. Which brings me to the point: Compliance isn't just there to cargocult and boxtick. It's there because, left to their own devices, most organisations/sub-organisations will end up, at pinnacle-best, half-assing security. Compliance is an easy way to force everyone to three-quarter-ass, possibly even hit 90%. It's true that, without compliance, some orgs will hit 99%. It's true that some compliance requirements force you to be less secure than you might otherwise have chosen [1] But it's also true that for every org that would hit 99% under their own steam, there are a hundred that would do the default ubuntu install, then only patch when something breaks. And that is why I like compliance. I work with our compliance team on lots of things, and everybody ends up winning. [1] Consider password rules. Some compliance rule says must have a couple funny characters and a mixture of upper and lower case, minimum ten characters. Basically, forces a password that users hit the minimum on, then have no choice but to write down. Compare with an entropy-based measure that would lets users have an essay question, but one that's memorable and has higher entropy. Far more secure, yet rarely how compliance express their password concerns.
- walrus01 4y ago> Which brings me to the point: Compliance isn't just there to cargocult and boxtick. It's there because, left to their own devices, most organisations/sub-organisations will end up, at pinnacle-best, half-assing security. I have to agree with you because I have seen first hand how many ordinary office workers, if left to their own devices and not given any other tool that they're mandated to use, will happily and blithely do things like store shared credentials/passwords in an Office365 Excel sheet that everyone in the company has access to. It's the role of the infosec people to set up something better and work with the C-levels to ensure that its usage is mandated, and people are not sneakily bypassing its use or sharing credentials for expediency's sake.
- busterarm 4y agoI largely agree with you, but the problem ends up being when you have some braindead person in your GRC role who persistently fails to grok the scale of the operation...or doggedly insist that you prove negatives. Example: Some idiot person we have in IT insists that a control for proving lack of user admin access should be to screenshot the userlist w/ group permissions of every single server in our operation. Idiot IT person doesn't realize that we're at n*10^5 servers and still fails to understand how braindead his request is when you explain it to him. A lot of people now persue the IT security industry itself without having any shred of experience managing computer systems, then confidently wade out into industry claiming to be experts.
- hnbear 4y agoI’ve found it immensely frustrating in numerous roles when discussing security, audit and compliance requests that the requesters can seldom actually explain their reasoning. I want a clear statement of risk and why their proposed compensating control actually mitigates it. Far too often the answers are just “it’s securerer” or “it’s the way we do it”, and actually proposing something that genuinely mitigates the underlying issue is ignored. All that said, I’ll end up referencing this in the future as somewhat useful steps in a number of situations. Some have simpler approaches - eg for password security can just reference NIST guidelines which currently clearly state not to rotate and just require length above complexity. And they’re backup to with tested evidence and a clear rationale.
- onphonenow 4y agoAgreed totally. I had a nightmare govt double vpn situation. Very hard to get an account, you had to run ancient OS and Java (it would annoy you with warnings about lack of security/age) and comical password complexity / rotation rules. The result was rampant password sharing but also because you had this double vpn setup, each layer rotating - folks just couldn’t remember passwords. So they outsourced password reset. To reset your passwords you provided your 100% predictable username - that was it. Even I had to get a reset due to an inactivity lockout and I had to laugh at how easy it was after all the silliness - I could have given any username
- sokoloff 4y agoI aim to build systems that are both secure and compliant. It’s convenient when (but not a given that) those two adjectives overlap with each other.
- Kalium 4y agoI've found that quite often, the people suggesting that "they way we do it" mitigates a risk don't understand either aspect. Their goal is to achieve the feeling of having made it go away. They only want to do the thing and compliance is getting in the way, as they see it. Understanding the risk often works against that, as it might put them in a position of having to understand just how much effort they are wasting as they live with lots of residual risk that their superiors don't actually want. To put it another way, using a risk-mitigation approach instead of compliance only works when you have honest, earnest, and full good faith investment in the process. In practice, this is incredibly rare. We all know, are, or have been engineers who cannot imagine a system they wrote running without them having the ability to SSH in and sudo at will without having to justify anything. This is where compliance comes in. It sets standards and forces the issue. Even bad faith, low-effort implementations wind up having to meet a whole series of very clear - if occasionally box-tick-y - standards.
- trabant00 4y agoCargo culting is unavoidable. We build everything "on the shoulder of giants". We do not have the infinite time and energy to analyse every problem from beginning to end and develop a perfectly fitting solution for it. For the most part we must copy behavior observed in successful entities. We also do not have the energy and effort to perfectly analyze the observed behavior so some data is lost in the copy. You end up with ceremonial solutions to problems that might not even exist in your case. Ceremonies mostly get discarded by evolutionary pressure in the long term. Some end up taking a lot of time and energy to perform for zero benefits so they reduce the evolutionary fitness of those who perform them. These ceremonies get gradually removed from the "gene pool", being replaced by behaviors that actually bring some benefit. But those will be imperfectly copied as well and the cycle begins again.
- trashtester 4y ago> We build everything "on the shoulder of giants" There may be huge variances in the degree that we do that, though, and to the degree that we're able to prevent really bad ideas to spread. Some organizations are seeing really bad (but good looking) ideas spread like cancers, until the organization is completely perverted. > Ceremonies mostly get discarded by evolutionary pressure in the long term. This is perhaps the main strength of capitalism. There needs to be an actual mechanism for bad ideas to die off. Many large organizations (especially "too large to fail" or publicly owned) lack good mechanisms to limit the growth of organizational entropy.
- karlkloss 4y agoYou don't know anything, and have no control, so you create an illusion of control. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_control https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusion_of_control
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- getoffmyyawn 4y agoI'm currently working at a mid-size startup that is undergoing ISO27001 certification. A lot of the complaints we are getting from employees are similar to the contents of this article. Part of my job is training our staff on the new requirements. They question everything from why each individual has to badge in one by one to why doors can no longer be propped open. Why can they no longer access company resources with personal gear? Why can't they install whatever they want on their company gear? It goes on and on. My answer is always the same, in order to be certified we need to show that we have demonstrable, verifiable control over this (for example entry logging).
- dspillett 4y agoAway from standards like that, we also sometimes have requirements from clients' compliance people, and "what they don't know won't hurt them" (which some would love to get away with) doesn't, can't, wash. We will directly loose work, or the chance to bid for it, if we don't comply or can't demonstrate compliance. People moan less about some inconveniences if it is explained as "because jobs or bonuses may be at risk of we don't comply".
- m3047 4y agoIf you truly have control, then largely the artifacts of that control should be auditable by everyone. The security cameras. The door logs. The DNS and netflow logs. Ok, not sure about 10,000 screenshots showing nobody has admin access...