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The Insecurity Industry

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Re: The Insecurity Industry

#371

Post by vagrantJin »

denton-scratch wrote: post #121
vagrantJin wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I saw someone else talking about Rust, but I don't think that's what would happen in such a world. I agree. Let's not use tools as a crutch. Roman engineers built bridges that are still standing today with little to no maintenance. There's no indication that those structures are going to fail anytime soon either. I think we can agree that their tooling was worse than our current bridge building tools. > I mean like…

> Roman engineers built bridges that are still standing today Roman engineers didn't understand the principles of civil engineering; I'm sure they built a lot of stuff that fell down (survivorship bias). So they started massively over-engineering their structures ("moar rocks!")

> I'm sure they built a lot of stuff that fell down

Survivorship bias is the favourite catchphrase for HN these last few years.

I think you overestimate the importance of academic theory over practicality.

"Moar rocks" is a perfectly reasonable way ro fortify a structure. Because 1000 years from now engineers will be wondering how any of our stuff survived ("moar cement and steel rods!")

So yeah, I have a healthy respect for practicality.

Re: The Insecurity Industry

#372

Post by 7373737373 »

pyuser583 wrote: post #364
7373737373 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely not, unfortunately. One of the architectural issues plaguing even comparatively memory-safe languages is the fact that there is a global scope that's accessible from anywhere. In some Python versions even numbers or truth values could be redefined. [0] This makes it impossible to sandbox functions or imported modules, because they can communicate arbitrarily. But communication/access security is not the on…

I find the idea of resource security very interesting - I haven’t heard of it before. Isn’t that the opposite of secure? Pulling resource allocations out of the kernel and putting it into user land?

Not if done correctly. Have a look at this link: https://github.com/void4/notes/issues/41

There is no issue with just limiting resources (unless there is unpredictable overhead). It doesn't have to be hardware resources either, it could be abstract/higher level resources like interpreter steps or managed memory slices.

I'm creating a series of VMs to show that this is possible, like rarVM, the recursively sandboxable virtual machine: https://esolangs.org/wiki/RarVM

Showcase: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBymOp6bTII

When calling a function you can specify how many interpreter steps it can run until it aborts (and optionally gives you a continuation so you can "refill" and resume it later).

Stackless Python can do this too, but unfortunately due to the reasons discussed above will never be a safe language, also this specific mechanism works only in trusted environments since the called function has the ambient authority to increase its own resource limits: https://stackless.readthedocs.io/en/2.7-slp/library/stackles...

Re: The Insecurity Industry

#373

Post by ozim »

grncdr wrote: post #293
ozim wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal website - what if someone takes over your server and does malicious stuff? Are you going to put up with accountability that you might have misconfigured something and it allowed attackers to scam people or serve porn? You are perfectly sure that you are going to keep your small site updated all the time and you won't forget about it? Because that is where it is going - it is not just code that can be vulnera…

> what if someone takes over your server and does malicious stuff? What if somebody steals my kitchen knife and uses it as a murder weapon? > Are you going to put up with accountability that you might have misconfigured something and it allowed attackers to scam people or serve porn? Yes. This is (and always has been) the price of operating a website on adversarial public networks. We established relatively simple wa…

I would like to present you how complex life is, maybe you embedded a video on your personal website and no one hacked your apache/nginx:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8xz3/a-defunct-video-hosti...

People like to embed things in their personal websites - integrate them with third parties. That is my point.

Now you are responsible for what you embed on your personal website and what you publish.

Re: The Insecurity Industry

#374

Post by ncmncm »

bob1029 wrote: post #350
ncmncm wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no supply-chain accountability without liability. When adding a dependency, knowing it exposes you to prosecution if it becomes a vector for security violation would give pause. A premium on attested-secure components might develop. If Facebook depended on Zst being secure to be able to stay in business, we might be more inclined to use Zst than e.g. unmaintained Zlib.

> A premium on attested-secure components might develop Isn't this effectively the Microsoft/IBM/Oracle ecosystem play?

The difference is that they purport to sell you assurance (and lie), where aping FB would leave you no more exposed than deep-pockets (therefore attractive-target) FB.

Re: The Insecurity Industry

#375

Post by imwillofficial »

wly_cdgr wrote: post #303
imwillofficial wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The design process is pretty rigorous. Anything to back up your idea?

Challenger, Columbia (safety culture at NASA really improved after Challenger huh), Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima, recent FL condo collapse, my average five story Brooklyn apartment building's basement and roof after a thunderstorm, Boeing's long and growing list of recent fuckups... is some stuff that comes to mind off the top of my head. Makes you wonder how many close calls, less major incidents, cracks…

Every building that has never collapsed on you

Re: The Insecurity Industry

#376

Post by raxxorrax »

pjmlp wrote: post #344
raxxorrax wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a completely unrealistic demand of software and security. I am really surprised of Snowdens arguments here. The law makers cannot make the internet safer by one bit. Technical experts can and lawyers would dream to have leverage against them. They should be denied.

Nope, it is a matter to apply the same liability process that are already in place for high integrity computing and enterprise project deliveries.

I deliver software for enterprise and there is no such thing. I even develop software for medical appliances that have an extended software validation process.

It is about minimizing risk and it is a process that acknowledges that risk cannot be removed completely. It just forces you to work carefully and eliminates neglectful practices.

No serious developer will ever commit to ship software free of bugs. On the contrary, that would give people false security, which can in turn lead to further neglect.

Re: The Insecurity Industry

#377

Post by renewiltord »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #369
renewiltord wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a personal philosophy: "if you can't do it well, don't do it at all". That's because I prize my ability at what I do. I am good at it. I am a craftsman. Not like these fly-by-night characters busy dropping concrete on people's heads. Maybe I need to teach these "real engineers" something about building things haha: "If you can't do it without killing people, don't do it". Man, that's a motto for the ages. You'…

I see an awful lot of skyscrapers not falling down every day, stands to reason some engineers are good at what they do, no?

Oh there are good engineers, certainly. But the field as a whole clearly is immature since it causes more deaths than software engineers do.

Re: The Insecurity Industry

#378

Post by jodrellblank »

smolder wrote: post #345
jodrellblank wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is possible to build a bridge which doesn't fall down during normal use. Has any company demonstrated that it's possible to build large scale software with no security flaws in it? Microsoft haven't, Apple haven't, Google haven't, Facebook, IBM, Oracle, RedHat, Amazon, Cisco, Juniper, The Pentagon, The Whitehouse, The UK Government, the fact that we've heard of Snowden suggests the NSA haven't, banks haven't, airl…

> Not a tangent; Look at the recent discussion on HN about Windows Defender, and pretty much any security choice - it's full of people bemoaning Microsoft making decisions that are mildly inconvenient on the grounds of "how dare they think they know better than me", "I demand to be able to turn these security features off", "I want control to be able to do anything". I think it's somewhat reasonable to complain about…

> "They could've built their own rust-like language"

They tried. Windows Longhorn was to be "entirely" managed code in the early 2000s, by 2004 they walked that back because vendors didn't want to rewrite their software for managed code and there were too many performance issues. Then they scrapped Longhorn altogether. As a research project they built: "Midori is an operating system that did not use Windows or Linux. Was written in C#. Took 7 years to build and included device drivers, web servers, libraries, compilers and garbage collection.". From what I know, they tried harder than Apple+macOS or anyone+Linux kernel and couldn't do it. To then casually say "they could've" is not so convincing. Especially if in this "you're responsible for bugs" world they would have had to have Proto-Rust production ready around the time of Windows NT in 1993 or so.

https://www.theregister.com/2005/05/26/dotnet_longhorn/

https://www.theregister.com/2004/05/06/microsoft_managed_cod...

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/csharp-systems-programmi...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27809296

> "That we've mostly settled for constant security updates upon exploit discovery in the wild and blindly assuming super old code is safe (until it isn't) seems like a failure to act (a failure of incentives?) and not a necessity."

The blogpost I link below[1] was written in 2004, and he says "I truly believe that the patching fad in which we are currently living is not going to last much longer. It can't. In another couple years, we'll have one full-time patcher to each system administrator. What's odd is that if companies simply exercised a bit of discipline, it wouldn't be necessary at all. Back in 1996 a buddy of mine and I set up a web server for a high-traffic significant target. It was not the Whitehouse; it was a porn site. We invested 8 hours (of our customer's money) writing a small web server daemon that knew how to serve up files, cache them, and virtualize filenames behind hashes. It ran chrooted on a version of UNIX that was very minimized and had code hacked right into the IP stack to toss traffic that was not TCP aimed at port 80. 10 years later, it's still working, has never been hacked, and has never been patched. If you compute the Return On Investment (Or ROI in the language of Prince Ciao) it's gigantic."

And yet the patching fad has got hugely worse since then, and all the factors he complains about - CEOs buying from salespeople, desire for customisability and flashiness - are all still driving the industry hard.

[1] http://www.ranum.com/security/computer_security/editorials/m...

Re: The Insecurity Industry

#379

Post by smolder »

jodrellblank wrote: post #378
smolder wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not a tangent; Look at the recent discussion on HN about Windows Defender, and pretty much any security choice - it's full of people bemoaning Microsoft making decisions that are mildly inconvenient on the grounds of "how dare they think they know better than me", "I demand to be able to turn these security features off", "I want control to be able to do anything". I think it's somewhat reasonable to complain about…

> " They could've built their own rust-like language " They tried. Windows Longhorn was to be "entirely" managed code in the early 2000s, by 2004 they walked that back because vendors didn't want to rewrite their software for managed code and there were too many performance issues. Then they scrapped Longhorn altogether. As a research project they built: " Midori is an operating system that did not use Windows or Lin…

I appreciate your reply. I had heard of Midori but didn't know much. It's good to learn more about those efforts.

Even when I say "they could've", it was in some part wishful thinking that we can even get to a state of the art where constant bug-patching can go away. I believe we can in theory. I also know that the nuance of reality often gets in the way of that kind of idealism.

Re: The Insecurity Industry

#380

Post by dang »

fraktl wrote: post #176
native_samples wrote: post #167

I find Snowden's take on software engineering to be poorly reasoned and internally inconsistent. The most important fact related to his argument is one he doesn't even bother mentioning, namely that Android is mostly written in a memory safe language (Java). The thing he's asking for already exists and is deployed on most smartphones worldwide, yet all he has to say on the topic is this: "While iPhones are more priva…

If you really cared about the topic, you'd see beyond your favorite language getting rekt, because let's be honest - it's shit because of people who are using it. And that's why we can't have nice things - shortsighted manchildren like you are making it impossible.

Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. No more of this, please.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: you've unfortunately been doing this repeatedly in your recent comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27891065

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27890950

This is easily grounds for banning you. I don't want to ban you right now, because you've posted good things in the past—but if you break the site guidelines like this again, we will have to, so please fix this. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site to heart, we'd be grateful.

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