3 ms·

It’s the combinatorics. A small company might have a hundred micro services and some tens of third party dependencies and most of both only get touched or looke

It’s the combinatorics. A small company might have a hundred micro services and some tens of third party dependencies and most of both only get touched or looked at when something goes wrong. Add in any code shipped to client machines and the various versions of everything and then add in basically everything related to IT and phishing and…

pixl97 3y ago
Software that gets used ships with insecure defaults, and software that ships hardened and totally locked down and must be configured for everyone's individual use case typically doesn't become successful.
hathawsh 3y ago
Exactly. Employee A adds a feature and adds security policies X and Y to prevent abuse. Employee B adds another feature and disables policy X because it conflicts with the new feature and policy Y is still in place. Employee C adds some functionality that conflicts with policy Y, but reasons that's OK because a comment says the feature is protected by both the X and Y policies. So policy Y gets disabled too. You can see why everyone would then start pointing fingers at each other. Hopefully, regular reviews and careful analysis prevent this kind of situation.
- thephyber 3y ago
  The combinatorics works against “regular reviews and careful analysis”. The more the network grows, the more time+resources each review will take, but must be done at a regular interval, squeezing out other priorities. The best solution to keeping the combinatorics down is to have someone with authority who is happy to say “no” when a proposed new service doesn’t closely align with the org’s key goals.
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  > Hopefully, regular reviews and careful analysis prevent this kind of situation. Without incentives it will just keep happening. We need to: 1. Incentivize emphasis on security by penalizing data breeches in a non-trivial way 2. Make orgs much more careful about the data they collect by mandating penalties which scale exponentially with the potential harm of the data which was released -- up to and including existential destruction

pixl97 3y ago

Software that gets used ships with insecure defaults, and software that ships hardened and totally locked down and must be configured for everyone's individual use case typically doesn't become successful.

hathawsh 3y ago

Exactly. Employee A adds a feature and adds security policies X and Y to prevent abuse. Employee B adds another feature and disables policy X because it conflicts with the new feature and policy Y is still in place. Employee C adds some functionality that conflicts with policy Y, but reasons that's OK because a comment says the feature is protected by both the X and Y policies. So policy Y gets disabled too. You can see why everyone would then start pointing fingers at each other. Hopefully, regular reviews and careful analysis prevent this kind of situation.

thephyber 3y ago
The combinatorics works against “regular reviews and careful analysis”. The more the network grows, the more time+resources each review will take, but must be done at a regular interval, squeezing out other priorities. The best solution to keeping the combinatorics down is to have someone with authority who is happy to say “no” when a proposed new service doesn’t closely align with the org’s key goals.
Eisenstein 3y ago
> Hopefully, regular reviews and careful analysis prevent this kind of situation. Without incentives it will just keep happening. We need to: 1. Incentivize emphasis on security by penalizing data breeches in a non-trivial way 2. Make orgs much more careful about the data they collect by mandating penalties which scale exponentially with the potential harm of the data which was released -- up to and including existential destruction