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> There is no way to add a safety margin to code. This is, in my opinion, an incredibly naive take. There are currently decades of safety margin in basically

by jmb99 2y ago

> There is no way to add a safety margin to code. This is, in my opinion, an incredibly naive take. There are currently decades of safety margin in basically all running code on every major OS and device, at every level of execution and operation. Sandboxing, user separation, kernel/userland separation, code signing (of kernels, kernel extensions/modules/drivers, regular applications), MMUs, CPU runlevels, firewalls/NAT, passwords, cryptography, stack/etc protections built into compilers, memory-safe languages, hardware-backed trusted execution, virtualization/containerization, hell even things like code review, version control, static analysis fall under this. And countless more, and more being developed and designed constantly. The “safety margin” is simply more complex from a classic engineering perspective and still being figured out, and it will never be as simple as “just make the code 5% more safe.” It will take decades, if not longer, to reach a point where any given piece of software could be considered “very safe” like you would any given bridge. But to say that “there is no way to add a safety margin to code” is oversimplifying the issue and akin to throwing your hands up in the air in defeat. That’s not a productive attitude to improve the overall safety of this profession (although it is unfortunately very common, and its commonality is part of the reason we’re in the mess we’re in right now). As the sibling comment says, no one (reasonable) is asking for perfection here, yet. “Good enough” right now generally means not making the same mistakes that have already been made hundreds/thousands/millions of times in the last 6 decades, and working to improve the state of the art gradually over time.

btilly 2y ago
Exactly. Part of the evaluation has to be whether the disaster was due to what should have been preventable. If you're compromised by an APT, no liability. Much like a building is not supposed to stand up to dynamite. But someone fat fingered a configuration, you had no proper test environment as part of deployment, and hospitals and 911 systems went down because of it? There is a legal term that should apply. That term is "criminal negligence". But that term can't apply for the simple reason that there is no generally accepted standard by which you could be considered negligent.

by jmb99 2y ago

btilly 2y ago

Exactly. Part of the evaluation has to be whether the disaster was due to what should have been preventable. If you're compromised by an APT, no liability. Much like a building is not supposed to stand up to dynamite. But someone fat fingered a configuration, you had no proper test environment as part of deployment, and hospitals and 911 systems went down because of it? There is a legal term that should apply. That term is "criminal negligence". But that term can't apply for the simple reason that there is no generally accepted standard by which you could be considered negligent.