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Seventy years into the computer age, Moshe Y. Vardi at ACM wants to know why we still do not seem to know how to build secure information systems:
Cyber insecurity seems to be the normal state of affairs these days. In June 2015, the U.S. Office of Personnel Management announced it had been the target of a data breach targeting the records of as many as 18 million people. In late 2016, we learned about two data breaches at Yahoo! Inc., which compromised over one billion accounts. Lastly, during 2016, close to 20,000 email messages from the U.S. Democratic National Committee were leaked via WikiLeaks. U.S. intelligence agencies argued that the Russian government directed the breaches in an attempt to interfere with the U.S. election process. Furthermore, cyber insecurity goes way beyond data breaches. In October 2016, for example, emergency centers in at least 12 U.S. states had been hit by a deluge of fake emergency calls. What cyber disaster is going to happen next?
[...] The basic problem, I believe, is that security never gets a high-enough priority. We build a computing system for certain functionality, and functionality sells. Then we discover security vulnerabilities and fix them, and security of the system does improve. Microsoft Windows 10 is much, much better security-wise than Windows XP. The question is whether we are eliminating old vulnerabilities faster than we are creating new ones. Judging by the number of publicized security breaches and attacks, the answer to that question seems to be negative.
This raises some very fundamental questions about our field. Are we investing enough in cybersecurity research? Has the research yielded solid scientific foundations as well as useful solutions? Has industry failed to adopt these solutions due to cost/benefit? More fundamentally, how do we change the trajectory in a fundamental way, so the cybersecurity derivative goes from being negative to being positive?
Previously:
It's 2015. Why do we Still Write Insecure Software?
Report Details Cyber Insecurity Incidents at Nuclear Facilities
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday April 18 2017, @04:43AM (2 children)
Well, as TFS says "The basic problem is that security never gets a high-enough priority."
I also think software in general suffers from the German Disease. If one layer of abstraction is good, three, four, or five layers must be better. Pointless complexity expands the the number of attack surfaces.
The unix-like systems had a great deal more security built in, but even these suffer from weakness built into every single system component, partly because the the language they gravitated toward for coding didn't protect against buffer overruns and data type misuse.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @07:22AM
Pfft if I wanted protection from buffer overrun and data type misuse, I'd use managed VM languages like Java or C#.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @09:25PM
Yeah, I'm seeing more and more projects go the route of massive dependency injections. Updating becomes a hellscape of version control, and packages that worked before no longer work well with some other required package, etc. Short term productivity gains are preferred over long term stability and management. Node projects horrify me, even a simple theming framework can require hundreds of MB of libraries with package issues getting worse over time. OSX horrifies me, some people have computers a few years old and have to buy a new license just to install the latest web browsers. What kind of madness is that???
I think the larger issue is that the average software needs of most users has become a "solved problem" so now the software companies are coming up with products with short shelf lives. To run the latest widget you now need an expensive update, but if you ask the actual software engineers you find out that it would be trivially easy and inexpensive for the company to patch older systems.
Software should be designed for long term stability and security.