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Comment by BrandoElFollito | Hacker News Reader

Yes, building a safe airplane is doable. But this is not a good comparison.

Securing a company is like saying that you have to chnage all of the wiring in a country without impacting power supply. ALL of them - the house wirings, the cables transporting power, everyting. At once.

Security in a company is not a single system, it is a messy interaction of unknown dependencies nobody understands. And this mess runs a business.

Of course, there are plenty of things one can do but even for simple tasks such as "let's reset all the 100,000 accounts to make sure they are long/complex/whatever". This is asking for apocalypse.

How it is difficult is visible when you work in information security and have to balance the "we MUST NOT be hacked" and "we MUST NOT impact the business".

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> Yes, building a safe airplane is doable.

It didn't start out that way. It took a long time to figure out how.

> But this is not a good comparison.

I can't agree with that. I don't see any rationale for either airplanes or software systems being special.

> Security in a company is not a single system,

An airplane isn't, either. For example, part of airplane safety is the air traffic control system. Part is the weather forecasting system. And on and on.

Imagine you had airplanes be built the way they wanted, crashing from time to time, not starting and having people work on the wings to fix things in flight.

If this was something done for fun and without impact on people then nobody would care.

Suddenly, a Monday morning, someone says "woah, this cannot be - you have to fix this". But this is not fixable, you have to build a new plane from scratch, or completely review the existing ones. Planes would be grounded.

Now a software company: typically your old plane flying by more or less miracle (when it flies). You cannot fix it, you have to rebuild it. Either you ground the company and force them to build something new, or you will always have legacy.

The legacy is not fixable - it simply is not. You need money to redo everything and if you do not have the proper pressure then it will not happen.

Then, building a new company/software can be done the right way. This is not even difficult, I would even say that having these constraints will help in the overall quality. But this is a new software, not a "fix" of the old one.

Um, airplanes are constantly undergoing revision and improvements and bug fixes. Only very serious ones result in grounding. Eventually, they become too expensive to upgrade and Boeing/Airbus designs a ground up replacement.

Just like software.

> Yes, building a safe airplane is doable. It didn't start out that way.

And now only FAA/EASA etc. certified companies and individuals can build a commercial aircraft.

And they can only build the aircraft they are certified to, using the same certified components, and the same certified tools. They cannot change any aspect of the construction without another round with the authorities.

Let me know when the CIOs of listed companies are up for that kind of lifestyle for their email and word processors.

Certification/regulation is something orthogonal to the design methods used.

I disagree, mandated certification ensures that the budget required for certain design (and testing) methods is available.

And its precisely those methods that keep the planes in the sky.

Its not orthogonal, is a necessary prerequisite.

Dual path systems came first. Regulation came much later, it wasn't a prerequisite. Regulation didn't design airplanes, it standardized existing practice.

> Let me know when the CIOs of listed companies are up for that kind of lifestyle for their email and word processors.

I think you're absolutely right that this kind of rigidity is not part of our tech culture, but maybe it should be if that tech is running power grids, [oil] pipelines, and other critical infrastructure.

In summary - maybe we should spend more money so that we get systems which are reliable and resistant to this kind of attack. (_I_ think that's probably a good investment for power/transit/core network/safety systems)

"this kind of rigidity is not part of our tech culture"

Yes and no. "No" because there are best practices and bits of midleware that although may still get improvement over time, receive nevertheless fewer and fewer changes (and have logarithmic looking dynamic of development). They mature. Advising strongly things that passed the test of time and broad use scrutiny just makes sense, regardless if that may look "rigid". (Not that many implement their own double linked lists nowadays.) Then "yes" because the our "tech culture" pool is big enough to also accommodate fashion, hype, and a whole lot of other psychosocial can of worms...

"And they can only build the aircraft they are certified to, using the same certified components, and the same certified tools."

And that level of rigor is appropriate for the stakes that selling mass produced commercial aircraft implies. The discussion context was critical systems. But then you threw "word processors" in there. Why?

Because word processor documents have often been the vectors for attacks. And once an attack is inside your systems, there is nothing preventing the attack attached to a document from infecting and encrypting your machine or infecting your PLC and destroying your industrial equipment.

I'd say that the surface of attack here is the industrial equipment's link to general computing equipment (which it's expected to be less secure). The solution just can't be to secure the whole world of software that may somehow end up on general use computers. The point is, my remark is still valid, as a discussion on critical systems got mixed with clearly non-critical ones.

Ok, so I shouldn't have confused the issue by mentioning Stuxnet.

The point is, failing to secure those general use computers has bad consequences.

I don't think you confused the issue there at all, but forced a clarification of boundaries. The safety critical PLC industrial controller network should be isolated from the Net, however, even with the pipeline hack, the shutdown of the PLC network was due to compromise of billing systems, which are non-safety critical to the immediate user population (administration) but mission critical to the architecture of the western, market-mediated economic activity. You can't secure those systems perfectly, though we can definitely do better. The correct response, however, in this case is effective deterrence of those looking to engage in cyber offensives. Like it or not, when you can sit back outside the reach of effective enforcement measures, and cause mayhem and havoc, and make a buck doing it financial incentivization mechanisms pretty much ensure it will happen.

I just hope we don't take it too far. Many young and talented people in the CS and IT space cut their teeth testing the limits of legitimate access without pushing into the full on destructive regime these attackers have.

I'd hate to see things cracked down on so hard we lose a good signal for talent because we decide that the integrity of cyber systems must be defended at all costs. However, there needs to be a much more pronounced reaction to the types ofor blatantly malicious activity that has been escalating for the past decade or so.

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