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Comment by AdrianB1 | Hacker News Reader

> You can't hook something up to the internet, chuck it in your closet, forget about it for five years, and expect zero issues. You need to pay attention to it.

You should. 2 examples: - the average age of the planes for major airliners is 20 years. Maintenance - yes, retrofitting the cockpit every year just because a vendor decided to change the protocol for the sensor or control, no - about 18 years ago an intern in my company built (with external developers) an application for internal use; today the intern's career reached senior director level, left the company, the application is still used on a regular basis by every single employee; the only change was to move it from a physical server (there was no virtualization in 2002) to a VM. 5 years is not an unreasonable expectation from a damn thing to work without pampering

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>the average age of the planes for major airliners is 20 years. Maintenance - yes, retrofitting the cockpit every year just because a vendor decided to change the protocol for the sensor or control, no

Civilian airliners don't face a HUMAN DRIVEN ADVERSARIAL ENVIRONMENT for general airspace. In the rare occasions they do, everyone dies. Internet connected devices all do all the time, and indeed that is the entire point of all these security measures and upgrade requirements. I don't know why this is such a frequent screw up in comparisons by people complaining about security. Why bother with TLS at all? Plain old http is a ton simpler and easier. Why not just run everything as root? Etc etc. Systems were much simpler and more hackable back in the day, but running that way these days is simply not doable.

If you wanted to compare to planes, the proper comparison would be military aircraft. And those do indeed have constant block updates over their lifetimes to ECM, comms, weapons, etc. Dealing with an adversarial environment with intelligent adapter attackers requires adaption in turn.

Yes, but you are taking the analogy a bit too far. This is more on the level of vehicles requiring constant updates from the factory in order to be able to still use the roads.

>This is more on the level of vehicles requiring constant updates from the factory in order to be able to still use the roads.

No, it really isn't, unless you drive roads where people are constantly shooting at you and trying to hijack your vehicle. And even then, nothing stops you from just driving your regular vehicle, but insurance won't cover it and manufacturers won't support you and so on. If you want their armor/security systems and indemnities, you must agree to constant updates to counter constant new threats. Don't like that? You've got other options at your own risk/expense.

Adversarial situations are simply more dynamic no matter what they're applied to. What we gain is worth the cost, though it definitely can be a real pain. And to the extent the pain points can be reduced without diminishing security it's always well worth pursuing (and indeed easiness is of course a big part of good security). But that's going to be in the form of "trying to make regular updates easier/more reliable" not "throw it in a closet for 5 years" short of some sort of far future formalized bug free system that doesn't exist.

Fair enough. Thank you for the insight.

I'm extremely sympathetic to the frustration that led to your post but, yeah, I think that was probably the best phrasing of the argument that you and I can stay grumpy if we want to but probably shouldn't get our way that I've encountered for a while.

> I don't know why this is such a frequent screw up in comparisons by people complaining about security.

I have a suspicion that many, many engineers don't conceive of networked systems as participants in a human-driven adversarial environment. Many conceive of their software systems as little artifacts that function mostly independent of the outside world. When complete and functional, they should require no touching at all to continue doing so.

In other words, many people regard their computer systems as mechanistic and discrete things that can be declared "done" and treated as such. Many engineers work in shops where this is indeed how they work - ship a package and someone else does all the touching to keep it going.

I'm sympathetic. It took me a long time to make the jump to understanding software as operating services that always require maintenance, monitoring, and other forms of operation. Modern computers on modern networks simply cannot be treated as toasters if we want that level of reliability.

The paradigm shift isn't always easy or fun.

If that system was mission critical, would you just leave it running there and not pay attention to it? No monitoring whether the VM is running, the disks are full, the processes are down?

Paying attention doesn't mean that you have to personally look at it every day. Set something up to let you know when something isn't right.

And as you mention: planes get maintained. Nobody lets a plane fly for 20 years without paying attention.

Planes are checked between each flight for basic issues, have a lengthy checklist to go through before using and are often under support contract from the manufacturer.

If you want that level of support you need to pay for it, and you can by using other CA:s. The rest of us we can use letsencrypt.

The first plane started in 1903, they have a bit more experience. Also they are crazy expensive and dangerous. Your mail server is not.

Mail and web servers should be a lot simpler to set up and maintain than aircraft too. But Letsencrypt, instead of making things simpler actually became a source of extra work, sometimes a lot of work.

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