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posted by cmn32480 on Tuesday April 18 2017, @01:43AM   Printer-friendly
from the we-should-demand-it dept.

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


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  • (Score: 2) by MostCynical on Tuesday April 18 2017, @10:33AM (3 children)

    by MostCynical (2589) on Tuesday April 18 2017, @10:33AM (#495775) Journal

    I expect most modern software is far less than $50 per line, and is unlikely to be tested beyond simple functional testing (did not break/did not kill anyone), and is unlikely to be documented *at all*.

    IoT stuff is likely being coded for $0.50 per line.

    A "good" router, to NASA spec, would cost $10,000,000.

    Alas, everyone goes and buys the $200 model.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @06:09PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @06:09PM (#495937)

    A "good" router, to NASA spec, would cost $10,000,000.

    Alas, everyone goes and buys the $200 model.

    Which makes perfect sense, because the security of your router against attackers is simply is not worth $9 999 800. For most people I would say it's not even worth $10. These products have essentially no margin so any extra development cost will mean a higher price tag on the shelf.

    A rational person acting in their own best interest should, all else being equal, choose the cheaper router over the "more secure" one. So it's no wonder that manufacturers don't bother with security, because it represents added cost for little, if any, benefit.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19 2017, @07:45AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 19 2017, @07:45AM (#496179)

      A rational person acting in their own best interest should, all else being equal, choose the cheaper router over the "more secure" one. So it's no wonder that manufacturers don't bother with security, because it represents added cost for little, if any, benefit.

      You don't understand what that phrase means, do you?

  • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday April 19 2017, @01:23PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday April 19 2017, @01:23PM (#496279) Journal

    I expect most modern software is far less than $50 per line, and is unlikely to be tested beyond simple functional testing (did not break/did not kill anyone), and is unlikely to be documented *at all*.

    IoT stuff is likely being coded for $0.50 per line.

    A "good" router, to NASA spec, would cost $10,000,000.

    Alas, everyone goes and buys the $200 model.

    I suspect it's still $50/line or more, but with $40 of every $50 going to management, $5 for time the coder spent updating Excel sheets of their progress, $4.75 for time the coder spent idle/browsing the web, and $0.25 for the time spent actually writing that line of code.

    Documentation does exist IME, but usually the requirements are written after the software is completed so that they match the actual behavior, and then the code is changed six more times before release without any updates to the docs. And testing begins six hours before the code gets deployed to production.