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Comment by zelon88 | Hacker News Reader

When some medical contractor misconfigures an AWS bucket and exposes 15,000 medical records we all lose our minds. It doesn't matter if the first bloke to find it was the researcher who disclosed it... We still go nuts. We make fun of the companies who come back and say "There was no evidence that the data was accessed by unauthorized parties." We know full well there's no evidence that the data WASN'T accessed by unauthorized parties.

Please stop pretending this isn't a big deal just because of a hard-on for Google. If you'll put a 10 man company out of business for their complacency and ignorance you should be lining up at Google HQ with pitchforks over this. They're supposed to be above this. They are hailed as a gold standard.

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> Please stop pretending this isn't a big deal just because of a hard-on for Google.

Please don't project strawmen onto other users, it's intellectually weak and rude besides.

So what do you say about the idea that it creates a disincentive to find security issues, because you'll be hit for them one way or the other?

Also, I fundamentally disagree with your example. If they did an adequate investigation, using a 3rd party service, and found no evidence of my data being accessed by a 3rd party, and then fixed it- I'd say, "Good job checking up on yourselves" and move on.

Security is still incredibly hard to get right. I'm willing to bet your service has security holes in it, right now- and that's not a hit against you. We haven't mastered these systems and anyone who thinks they have is just waiting to get bit in the ass. Every security professional knows: It's never, ever, a question of "if", but of "when".

> So what do you say about the idea that it creates a disincentive to find security issues...

If a company is disincentivized to look for security holes because it's highly likely it will find them; that company is on the fast-track to failing.

> If they did an adequate investigation, using a 3rd party service, and found no evidence of my data being accessed by a 3rd party

They found no evidence of data being accessed, but they also don't share how this particular system tracks data that is accessed. This system was vulnerable for 2-3 years. What if you left your car at my house and you found a dent on it, but I claim that I didn't have any security footage of someone damaging your car without mentioning that I don't actually have security cameras.

> I'm willing to bet your service has security holes in it...

You're right, and it I find that my NTP service is exploitable and anyone can DDOS me I'll fix it and move on. There's no need to disclose that I'm an idiot when it doesn't affect other people. But when I accidentally leave my servers mis-configured and my API unprotected against unauthorized access I would make a post about it. We're not talking about an arbitrary vulnerability that lets people echo hello on a Google server. They left data exposed. I would like to know if it involves me.

> If a company is disincentivized to look for security holes because it's highly likely it will find them; that company is on the fast-track to failing.

I don't see any evidence to back up this assertion. FWIW I don't believe this is true.

Agreed. When is the last time a company failed because of bad security?

Equifax seems to be doing alright.

Sony hasn’t failed yet.

I don’t think your opinion matches with reality.

Imagine you've been driving across the same bridge every day for 3 years, only to discover it had an inevitably catastrophic structural flaw, only revealed when someone bothered to look, but the engineers, contractors, and government didn't want to talk about it.

How'd you feel then?

That actually happens.

Also bridges are built with a much bigger lifetime in mind and require (proving GP's point) a much bigger investment.

I now think I replied to the wrong post. This thread is more confusing than most. We're all talking past each other. We (this group) likely agrees more than we disagree.

Depends, did they fix it immediately?

> We haven't mastered these systems and anyone who thinks they have is just waiting to get bit in the ass.

We've absolutely mastered these systems.

We just prioritize rapid development time and ease of use over security.

People make fun of DoD / space price tags (and admittedly, there's still a lot of crap sold there), but it's a trade off.

If we wanted computers to cost $x0,000 and OSes to cost $x,000, and the pace of progress to be glacial, we could have completely secure systems today.

It's a choice, not an impossibility.

>If we wanted computers to cost $x0,000 and OSes to cost $x,000

That's an interesting theory that's not supported by historical evidence as far as I can tell. When computers were expensive, there just were less people with access. The systems were not any more secure.

I think ethbro is saying that focusing on absolutely secure systems would drive up costs, not that if we make them more expensive we'll somehow get more security just because they're more expensive.

I think this is overlooking the real criticism, which is that there is no evidence that simply wanting something to be secure would make it so.

For example, the parent article, the one this comment is ostensibly in response to, has nothing to do with operating system security.

They weren't suggesting we need more secure OSes specifically, that was just an example.

A better example is maybe instead of Google spending $xxx,000 to develop the system that was found insecure they should have spent $x,000,000 so they had more resources devoted to the security aspects.

Perhaps this is too high for this system to exist; well maybe that system just shouldn't exist if it can't be secured properly with the budget for it.

> We just prioritize rapid development time and ease of use over security.

> If we wanted computers to cost $x0,000 and OSes to cost $x,000, and the pace of progress to be glacial, we could have completely secure systems today.

> It's a choice, not an impossibility.

Progress in core OSes and conventional hardware has already slowed down to a glacial pace, compared with previous decades. Rapid development is often used to just create a churn of useless sidegrades and other poorly thought out things (deceptively sold as upgrades).

It might be time to make that different set of choices.

it is an impossiblity in all practical senses. This is the entire premise of Chromium. Knowing that there will always be bugs but designing the system so they are unlikely to be able to do bad things.

there's two points there

acknowledging it's impossible to have zero bugs ... and ... acknowledging that there will be exploits.

sure you can do better than average but "completely secure" is a myth

as for DoD there's this from 3 days ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18177617

It's only impossible when you look at rapidly developing, easy to use systems.

Which is my point and why the broad assertion is wrong.

Look at a VxWorks type OS. Or OpenBSD. Limited capability and compatibility, very strong security guarantees.

"Completely secure" isn't a mythical unicorn. It just costs time and money. A LOT of time and money.

>So what do you say about the idea that it creates a disincentive to find security issues, because you'll be hit for them one way or the other?

But is that really what would happen? Vulnerabilities are frequently found and publicly reported. The reaction depends on the type of vulnerability (how stupid it sounds) and on whether or not the vulnerability resulted in a breach. You don't get hit equally hard for all security issues.

I think both users and developers have to be mature enough to deal with this sort of thing without resorting to secrecy. Secrecy creates distrust as the reaction to this particular Google+ issue shows.

> So what do you say about the idea that it creates a disincentive to find security issues, because you'll be hit for them one way or the other?

Were this actually the case, the CSV list (not even mentioning Google's own Project Zero) would have disincentivized companies and projects years ago.

> So what do you say about the idea that it creates a disincentive to find security issues, because you'll be hit for them one way or the other?

With big enough repercussions it should incentivize processes that don't allow it to happen in the first place. This is how HIPPA and various other things work already and it does a decent job (not perfect though).

I'd also say that we need decide if mistakes are forgivable and whether or not if it's based on impact.

Perhaps for a small data leak it's forgivable, and we won't hit them with a huge fine or whatever. If it's a big leak then maybe we need to jail people.

It's a bit of a strawman to say everything has security holes because it's assuming the problem is unfixable from the start.

It's a bit like launching a person into space. "We know that probability we'll be sending people to their death is high, let's not bother then." We decided to do it anyway but we set extremely high bars for safety.

>...you should be lining up at Google HQ with pitchforks over this. They're supposed to be above this. They are hailed as a gold standard.

Especially given the way Google, quite rightly, expose vulnerabilities through Project Zero.

The difference here is that Google found this problem itself, and evaluated with high confidence that it was likely unknown to anyone outside that audit.

That means that Google was proactively checking it’s work to make sure it was secure, unlike your example where nobody was likely ever going to notice that bucket was misconfigured.

They’re the gold standard because they find and clean up their own shit, even when nobody is pressing them to do it.

Do we? "Some user data exposed on AWS due to crappy S3 permissions" happens like forty times a year. People publish papers annually just finding stupid crap like this in mobile apps. Misconfiguration bugs happen in thousands upon thousands of products. Where do we lose our minds?

When it makes headline news... typically.

Less than 1% of these make the news. Papers regularly find tens of thousands of examples of this vuln.

There is a qualitative difference between an internally discovered vulnerability - presumably by somebody with lots of access, knowledge, and the ability to verify their hypotheses - and an externally discovered vulnerability.

Furthermore, if every potential vulnerability that might have been exploited needs to be reported as a breach... then each and every bug in any library and other dependency you use likely needs a breach report too - after all, you typically cannot verify retrospectively whether that exploit wasn't independently discovered and abused before the fix.

I'm not even positive such a reporting requirement would really be a bad idea, but it would definitely needs some more mature reporting and population education to tell the two classes of issue apart, especially since it's pretty vague where you draw the line on what needs publication once you get that far.

I think there is a difference between a vulnerability in an internal system, and blatantly exposing data to the public requiring little technical acumen to obtain.

It wasn't an internal system. It was discovered within Google (internal as it was used originally). The wording is accidentally confusing.

Comparing this to the Cambridge Analytica breach or a HIPPA violation is disingenuous.

This is the information that was possibly was exposed: https://developers.google.com/+/web/api/rest/latest/people

If you're going to be harangued for all vulnerabilities, exploited or not, then why proactively try to prevent breaches at all?

You say that as if being harangued is the worst thing that could happen to a company.

Plus, were this the case, the CSV list would have stunted vulnerability exploration across the board. Have you seen the list of vulnerabilities discovered in curl?

I thought I was going to agree with you and then it all went sideways. You are right that some people "lose [their] minds" over the AWS scenario. I think the person that you are responding to is making the point that they shouldn't in that case either.

It isn't that it is Google that makes the difference, but the extent of the damage.

>We know full well there's no evidence that the data WASN'T accessed by unauthorized parties.

Really? If Google has access logging on its content, and as in your example an AWS bucket can be configured for access logging then it would be fairly straightforward to identify if the data was accessed.

Google does not have (or claims not to have) that kind of logging beyond the short term; not enough to cover even a small fraction of the vulnerability period.

You don't need to resort to crude sexual language or imply parent commenter's opinion isn't in good faith, rather than out of some blind corporate allegiance.

You're supposed to be above this here on HN.

I'm not nit-picking, but your mention of "gold standard" got me thinking. What is Google the gold standard of? They have the top search product which is built on possibly gold standard software, server and networking technologies, but beyond that, are they considered the top standard in anything else? Maybe privacy and security should be important to their business models over the long term, but I'm not sure there is a unified coherent thought in the company's mind that better privacy and security help them make money with search, which is their chief priority. In other words, they can make heaps and piles of money every day with bad privacy and security, and I don't think they were ever considered a gold standard for either of those.

Google is near universally considered one of the gold standards of infrastructure & application security.

So besides applications, infrastructure, distributed systems, reliability, money & security what have the Romans ever given us?

It would be hard to make a case that they're not one of the 3 best defensive security teams in the world, and that very much includes every world government. You could go back and forth about whether they're #1 or #2 or in 2- or 3-way tie.

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