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We have a year to fix security everywhere

jyn.dev

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Re: We have a year to fix security everywhere

#341

Post by solatic »

bloppe wrote: post #333
thunderfork wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accounting is generally both easier to do correctly and easier to verify than security practices, unfortunately

We're talking about reporting breaches, not giving yourself some sort of abstract security score

And how do you know if you have been breached if you (negligently, in my opinion) have no audit logging, multiple principals sharing the same account, and no anomaly tracking? Does a breach only happen if the attacker brags openly about it?

The difference with accounting is that, relatively speaking and certainly within this context, few businesses are cash businesses. Your bank is keeping at least a basic audit log of money coming in and out of the corporate bank account. Your payment processor is keeping at least a basic audit log of who paid you and how much. You won't make your auditors happy if they're the only documents you have, but they're at least something to be handed over in an audit that pretty much every software business will have. Cybersecurity? By default, nothing is collected.

Re: We have a year to fix security everywhere

#342

Post by esperent »

wolvoleo wrote: post #316
esperent wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> blows up the others' house. Sometimes half the block along with it Can you provide a source for this? I had a look but all I could find were a couple of scaremongering style media reports from ~2022 saying it's getting worse but no information about if any of the bombs actually went off or if anyone was injured. Certainly nothing like "half a block" getting blown up "sometimes".

Here a whole building evacuated: https://nos.nl/artikel/2605174-vier-woningen-onbewoonbaar-na... Some inhabitants of neighbouring flats are still banned from their flat. And it was three weeks ago. Five houses unhabitable: https://nos.nl/artikel/2605174-vier-woningen-onbewoonbaar-na... It's also very common with robbing ATMs, usually known as "plofkraak" but that phenomenon seems to have subsided a bit.

> Five houses unhabitable: https://nos.nl/artikel/2605174-vier-woningen-onbewoonbaar-na...

This doesn't say anything about homemade bombs. It just says some boys were seen running away and police assume it was a crime. It could literally have been teenagers and a firework that started a fire.

Re: We have a year to fix security everywhere

#343

Post by mikewarot »

Not radical enough, there are only 3 mentions of "air gap" and zero mentions of data diodes in the article.

The focus seems to be more of the same failed strategy:

  a shift to "safe" programming languages
  a focus on patching known bugs proactively
  ratcheting up rules and enforcement
This all amounts to "try harder", which isn't going to work. We need a ground up restructuring of everything if we want to have a stable foundation upon which to keep society going.

If you run critical infrastructure, it must be air-gapped from the internet. If you need to monitor said infrastructure, there are data diodes which can be configured to allow the egress of monitoring data, with ZERO risk of allowing ingress of control, enforced by the laws of physics, not some code running on hardware that might not be perfect.

We need to channel everything important through clearly defined, and well monitored channels.

Ambient authority based operating systems were a great hack, but we need to leave them behind. Proven microkernel based OSs with everything running in userland, and all access provided using capabilities, with UI including powerboxes, are a bare minimum.

The amount of code and hardware we actually trust should be pushed towards zero as far as is possible. Linux, Windows, etc are all unfit for the present and future security needs of humanity.

As for AI/LLMs themselves. They're natively a huge amount of floating point math that results in token predictions. The code that runs the math is something we can control. There's no reason to give code access to anything about the machine it's actually running on. This should be something that can be enforced without extraordinary effort.

Re: We have a year to fix security everywhere

#344

Post by LoganDark »

Gigachad wrote: post #77
tgv wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still, it doesn't have to ping back, and ssh can (should) be very restrictive.

Ping and ssh are pretty much never the things being hacked though. Turn password auth off and it’s very secure. What gets hacked all the time is the actual web app itself. Which has to be exposed to be useful.

> Turn password auth off and it’s very secure.

Password auth and the root username. Use one attackers are unlikely to guess and elevate with sudo if needed.

Re: We have a year to fix security everywhere

#345

Post by PenguinHacker »

jasonvorhe wrote: post #175
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That information is easily available other places Often ease of access in the moment is all that matters. If there's a gun nearby you might shoot someone or yourself in a heated argument, but are less likely to go and find/buy one to use. Someone who's stopped from attempting a suicide will likely not try again (70%) A bored/depressed/angry/curious person might try to build a pipe bomb if they can find out how easi…

Most adults in Switzerland have guns at home from military duty and none of this is happening. If this claim had any truth to it you'd see significant gun involvement in neighbour disputes and that simply doesn't happen. Depressed people usually don't have the energy to get out of bed so they're even less likely to think of hunting down instructions on how to build pipe bombs. Mass media really has people being scare…

Indeed. I lived 5 years in Switzerland in the 1980’s including in a rented house where the owner left his military-issued rifle at home for us to play with. It was a beautiful weapon, & as Americans we didn’t understand why more disagreements between neighbors weren’t settled using it. But we assumed the Swiss were more homogeneous & polite so that as everyone had a rifle no-one used it. And this was during the Cold War when it was thought that Ronald Reagan would save Europe from any Soviet attack. Though he couldn’t save Switzerland from the effects of Chernobyl which we experienced while living there.

Re: We have a year to fix security everywhere

#346

Post by forshaper »

kennywinker wrote: post #339
forshaper wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In our town, a single homeless man has caused millions in infrastructure damage (and 24-48 hr hold ups of utilities) every year. I imagine what one determined, clear-headed individual might do and...it certainly wouldn't take a single LLM interaction.

Jesus. Seems like your town should house that man.

It is his God-given duty. I'm not sure housing will get in the way of his duty, but there are two options for that.

He used to stick to water (God, you see, needs to flood our town to cleanse it), but once he did a lot of damage to communications from going after water, and so he's added that to his portfolio.

Re: We have a year to fix security everywhere

#347

Post by preg_match »

lelanthran wrote: post #335
preg_match wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, the minimalism of C results in writing overly complex code to solve simple problems. Things like type punning and bit hacks are common place in C. The end result is equivalent C code is much more complex than C++. For example, you need to remember to call free every time, forever, in every function. In C++ you just use unique ptr or shared ptr and you’re done. It’s a simpler model, enabled by the more com…

> The analogy I use is to physical tools. A screwdriver is simple, but building a house with only a screwdriver is complex. A suite of power tools is complex, but building a house with them is simple. The analogy I prefer is that it's safer to ride a bike down to the store than flying a space shuttle down to the store. [EDIT: Added trailing 'down to the store']

The absolute danger of a space shuttle is much greater than a bike. But the absolute danger of C++ versus C is… equivalent. All the suspicious memory things you can do in C++, you can do in C. In fact, with a couple more added in C (type punning via unions, for instance, is not standards compliant in C++, there are casts for that).

That’s not to say C++ is a good language. It’s a rotten, no good evil language. And the same things apply to C# versus C++.

A garbage collector is much, much more complex than reference counting and RAII, particularly the CLR GC which is a beast. But the extra complexity makes applications simpler, not more complex.

Re: We have a year to fix security everywhere

#348

Post by AngryData »

olmo23 wrote: post #148
kennywinker wrote: post #85

I'm confused why the worry about LLMs that will answer "how do I build a pipe bomb". That information is easily available other places. The anarchist cookbook has been around and available for 55 years, and yet pipe bombs are not going off all around us.

This is because to build a pipe bomb you need difficult to source materials. This is not the case for other types of threats (cyber / bio). I personally have no need for an LLM which will readily explain how to cut up the genotype of smallpox into small chunks which can pass the screening at the bio-labs, and can be readily assembled into the real thing by a second year lab-student.

Difficult to source materials? What? Gunpowder was made across the world hundreds of years ago. Metal working goes back thousands. And anyone can walk into a hardware store and buy stuff that removes 99.9% of the effort to blow stuff up.

Re: We have a year to fix security everywhere

#349

Post by FeepingCreature »

bamboozled wrote: post #329
FeepingCreature wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like there would be a massive attacker bias in multiple ways. Defenders need consent, attacker does not. Defenders have to work with the human body, attackers only have to break it. Defenders have to stick to the law, which may prevent them from releasing anything at all, attackers do not. And so on. I would not surprised if the attacker's task is a hundred times easier here.

I guess any virus that is super destructive is probably not something that can spread very far as it kills its hosts beforehand ?

Yep, you'd want to put it on a timer. Optimally trigger it off some natural event, maybe temperature, so it can achieve universal penetration before activating.

Re: We have a year to fix security everywhere

#350

Post by zahlman »

hypfer wrote: post #209
zahlman wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the risks that mere mortals can conceive generally involve control systems for dangerous equipment (I mean, equipment that can achieve dangerous effects) being connected to the Internet while having software vulnerabilities. Given the recent HF hack it seems likely that human-level intelligence could identify a fair number of avenues of attack, with some time and effort. To say nothing of anything superhuman. U…

> Unfortunately it seems like we can't assume we can "box" the AI (e.g., deny it connection to the Internet) and expect that to last Of course we can do that. It's not an eternal being of light existing on the astral plane, but some code executing on someone's GPU. It stops existing once you press Ctrl + C

> It stops existing once you press Ctrl + C

Your instance does. The words "expect it to last", along with the rest of the paragraph, are explaining the problem.

But let me try again.

You can't just expect everyone else to press Ctrl-C just because it would be a good idea for them to do so in order to not create the torment nexus. Some of them actively want the torment nexus. Many more don't believe in nexi and have no idea what you're talking about. Still more are not thinking about the possibility because of all the utility they're getting.

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