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Comment by wu-ikkyu | Hacker News Reader

>It is possible to build and deploy secure software.

By secure, you don't mean 100% secure, do you?

I mean secure as in, when the last of that product line's devices have retired or died of old age, there have been no successful exploits against that product.

Has there ever been such a product? What about exploits on the software/hardware underlying the supposedly secure software?

Critical devices should either be simple, or they should run open source firmware. If governments had required the ability to audit the IC designs that go into medical, military and national infrastructure equipment, then we would now have open source ICs.

I am seeing an incredible resistance to this idea of increasing the situational awareness and capabilities of the people who provision and maintain large deployments. Perhaps it is too soon to propose solutions. Perhaps, today, we should just express solidarity with the victims, and try to warn operators of unaffected, but vulnerable systems to temporarily take them offline.

My apologies to those that I have offended. As a software developer who has struggled for years to articulate the need for transparency and simplicity in our systems, I feel very frustrated right now.

How could you ever possibly verify that?

By simplifying the design, until your team can verify its security without throwing up their arms in frustration at the mere prospect. When people's lives are on the line, security is more important than features or convenience.

What you're describing is formal verification. While I agree with what you're saying, I'm not sure if you're just understating the the complexity of formally verifying systems or if you're implying that "being really careful and doing your due diligence" is practically invulnerable.

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