SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Tuesday April 18 2017, @01:03PM
I should be able to sue you for 7 figures.
Just ask the medical doctors how that turned out. They do what they have to in order to make a living and avoid lawsuits. Not the best care, optimization for bread and law. And of course insurance companies and lawyers laugh all the way to the banks on how the people allowed this from the start.
It's the same with DNS, once it went from practicality, technical merit and good judgement to money and law. Sanity went out too.
So don't invite these law trolls to yet another area to screw around with. They only benefit politicians, corporate media, bankers, lawyers and insurers. But almost always never you or the intended party to protect. If it's regulated by law, then these type of actors will invite themselves to crash your party.
Game theory!