Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday April 18 2017, @01:08PM

    by kaszz (4211) on Tuesday April 18 2017, @01:08PM (#495812) Journal

    There is no declaration of security problems on the package. Nor can you return it if you discover it has a vulnerable version. And as a individual consumer. Your bargaining power is minuscule.

    Top it of with closed source code and undocumented hardware.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2