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> "We can't stop the occasional problem" - yes, you can. Would you travel on commercial airliners if you thought that the aviation industry took this approach w
by msla 4y ago
> "We can't stop the occasional problem" - yes, you can. Would you travel on commercial airliners if you thought that the aviation industry took this approach with your life? I didn't think so.
This person has a fundamentally mistaken idea of how airliners and, therefore, security systems as a whole work. Yes, airliners have the occasional problem. That's why they have:
* checklists and inspections, to catch them beforehand
* communications, to catch them while they're evolving
* redundancies, to turn ramified problems nobody caught into annoyances instead of disasters
No matter how some people whine and moan, "Just Be Perfect" fails to be an actionable plan.
Also: Hackers will be cool as long as DRM and planned obsolescence/designed-in insecurities exist.
- acdha 4y agoIt sounds like you’re disagreeing but you’re restating his point: all of the things you listed are how rare events are prevented from becoming worse.
- msla 4y agoI am disagreeing because this person doesn't understand the concept of defense in depth: Occasional problems will happen, will ye or nil ye, and the best you can do is to, as you say, prevent them from becoming worse. Thinking airliners don't have occasional problems is missing a lot of what the air industry does that we can implement in other realms.
- acdha 4y agoHe clearly does elsewhere, so I would suggest reading this more charitably with the assumption that you’re talking about the same idea from different perspectives. If I’m the passenger, I don’t even know about something which is caught by a checklist or redundant hardware before it progresses. If I’m the pilot or mechanic, the reverse is true. In both cases, what matters is the spirit of the point: saying something is too infrequent to prevent is defeatist.
- msla 4y agoMaybe, but I interpreted that as him insisting we must eventually become perfect, which isn't going to happen.
- zdragnar 4y agoAirliners have to deal with all sorts of problems on the fly, literally. You can't stop lightning strikes, birds, engines catching fire, or any other myriad problems. It's such a terrible analogy I'm a little flabbergasted. Planes need to reboot all the time to clear out hardware and software faults. The occasional problem is planned for.
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- lolinder 4y agoI don't think the author intended to say that you can prevent all problems, I think they meant you can't just shrug and say "we can't help but get hacked". You can stop all problems from becoming critical, which is what airlines attempt to do. They talk earlier about defense in depth, so it's obvious that they're not oblivious to the need for redundant safety measures: > "We don't need a firewall, we have good host security" - no, you don't. If your network fabric is untrustworthy every single application that goes across the network is potentially a target. 3 words: Domain Naming System. > "We don't need host security, we have a good firewall" - no, you don't. If your firewall lets traffic through to hosts behind it, then you need to worry about the host security of those systems.
- msla 4y agoMaybe I'm being too harsh, but my interpretation of that point is that they expect we'll eventually become perfect, which isn't going to happen in the software world as it hasn't happened in the airline world, even though the airline world has more incentives to be perfect in the form of more penalties when it isn't.
- riffraff 4y agoMy understanding is the author suggestion is to start with a security first approach, rather than wait-and-fix. They don't expect the airline to be infallible, but they expect the airline to be proactively avoiding trouble.
- scotty79 4y agoThe most secure plane is the one that stays on the ground. It's always point of contention between people with security mindset and people that need to earn money to even hire people with security mindset.
- kortilla 4y agoYou’re not being too harsh, you’re missing the point. Defense in depth is not something you advocate for if you expect perfection.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago>> "We can't stop the occasional problem" - yes, you can. Would you travel on commercial airliners if you thought that the aviation industry took this approach with your life? I didn't think so. Also, security is like reliability/uptime: You pay for every nine. You want to keep the server up on a best effort basis and have only the most basic security? Cheap, easy, minimal time investment. You want 1 minute down per month and good security? It'll take time and effort. You want... IIRC airplanes have a failure rate around 1 in 14 million flights, give or take? How many billions of dollars do you have? Because quality still ain't cheap.
- josephg 4y ago> "We can't stop the occasional problem" - yes, you can. All those tools (checklists, redundancies, etc) exist to increase the reliability rate. And to stop the occasional problem (ground crew forgets to refuel plane) from turning into a disaster[1]. I might be overly generous, but thats my read of the author's intent. That just like in the airline industry, we have tools to stop occasional problems from turning into disasters. Things like: - Deployment scripts instead of manual processes - Dependency auditing (ideally automated) - Automatic OS-level security updates - Memory-safe languages (Go, Rust, Java) instead of C/C++ - Defence-in-depth (firewalls, host security, etc) - Sandboxing (OpenBSD's pledge, Linux's seccomp, Deno's capabilities, etc) Just like checklists in the aeroplane industry, these approaches require active effort. We don't get secure software if nobody cares enough to make it a priority. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider
- sand500 4y agoI wonder how well the swiss cheese model works when there is an adversary actively targeting you as opposed to accidental disasters.
- scotty79 4y ago> checklists, redundancies These things are created and extended because occasional problems happened.
- closeparen 4y agoAs long as software has bugs and accepts user input, there are going to be ways to make it do things it shouldn't. You can avoid running specific known vulnerabilities. You can avoid creating certain kinds of dumb and obvious ones. But barring, like, formal verification, it is always possible for someone smarter or more patient than the original software development team to think real hard and come up with an edge case they didn't. And operational or system-level controls can only do so much about that. Preventing every security vulnerability is the same problem as writing bug-free code. And that is manifestly not happening, not even in the most sophisticated software development operations in the world.
- happymellon 4y agoThe fundamental flaw is normally "but doing it correctly would cost too much and take too long, what can we do for $5 and a chocolate bar?". Airline projects don't have the same level of issues because the FAA (or equivalent domestic authority) tells them to do it correctly.
- mrtweetyhack 4y ago[dead]
- SQueeeeeL 4y agoExcept when they don't, then you get the Boeing 747 MAX literally avoiding mandatory safety evaluations and ignoring engineers
- happymellon 4y agoBut that is notable for being unusual. After the FAA agreed that the two crashes were similar it grounded all planes, revoked Boeings certification authority, and fined Boeing. Has Lastpass received anything other than bad publicity?
- anticensor 4y ago737 MAX, but otherwise correct.
- Gigachad 4y agoIs there any real equivalent process for tech? It seems like the majority of security certifications is a box checking exercise where actually being secure has very little relation to how many boxes you checked.
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- baxtr 4y agoI think the analogy is highly flawed. Flying is mostly a safe and predictable environment.
- adql 4y agoAviation industry mostly protects against random failures and human mistakes, not targeted attacks so comparison there is silly from the start. There are lessons to be learned, but they are about building resilient systems, not secure ones. All of the "security" of airplanes pretty much relies on pilot noticing something is wrong, without that man with SDR could fuck up a lot of stuff
- trashtester 4y agoCame here to say this. Protecting the average corporate networks against the most sophisticated state actors is like protecting an airliner against an F35 armed with AIM-260 missiles.
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- mnw21cam 4y agoAlso, "penetrate and patch" is definitely at work in the airline industry. Yes, airliners are well designed as safe systems, but every now and again a problem does occur, to varying degrees of seriousness, and when such a problem is identified, it is patched. Defence in depth. Sure, design a system well. But "penetrate and patch" is another layer of protection. I mean, if you find your system is penetrated, what else can you do right now but patch it?