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This discussion has been archived.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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @06:45PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @06:45PM (#495958)

    An excellent point. In the enterprise world, the level of security is only worth the value of the assets being protected. This is generally a pretty simple cost/benefit analysis, with resources being allotted to security proportionately.

    Not simply the value of the asset: security is worth the cost of recovery due to a breach times the likelihood of such a breach occurring.

    Very simple example: I need a snow shovel to clear my walkway, and I am considering what will happen if my shovel is stolen.

    If my shovel is stolen, it will cost me $20 plus a trip to the store to buy a new one. This will probably take about 15 minutes, so if I value my time at $20/hr the total cost of recovery is $25.

    Now, I can't know the exact probability of my shovel being stolen. Where I live it is probably not 0 but should be close to it because I have never heard of snow shovels walking away on their own. So I will have to make up a number, say 0.01 (estimating that one out of every 100 shovels will be stolen).

    With those two estimates, I can conclude that securing my shovel is worth about $0.25. Since I valued my time at $20/hr, this means I am wasting my time securing my shovel if it takes more than 45 seconds over the entire lifetime of the shovel.

    Pretty much any recurring inconvenience will add up to more than 45 seconds over the shovel's lifetime. Therefore, I should maximize availability by leaving the shovel unsecured, close to where I will need it.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @09:35PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @09:35PM (#496031)

    A clear example of why we need publicly funded police (discourage crime) and legislation to require software security. If left up to spreadsheets we should kill off the vast majority of human beings instead of trying to fix our systemic issues. Bean counters are the worst and should be sent to the backseat instead of running Wallstreet and screwing over everyone else just to get some more beans.