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Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

And unfortunately the kind of thing that compliance flags as a big no-no once you've got any kind of filing or privacy requirements.

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This sort of thing doesn’t have to be a compliance breach, but you will likely need some way of ensuring there’s a second person in the loop, typically that would take the form of having someone in a separate production infrastructure team actually driving a while you talk them through what needs to happen.

Yes and with the added benefit of having to explain that control to your rotating bunch of compliance people every single year.

I'm not criticizing the methodology as much as the useless performative nature of compliance work.

Compliance is performative until it isn't. If you've ever been party to a breach, the role of compliance and an audit trail to the security narrative becomes _very_ important. Consider:

1. We had a breach. A factor in this was insufficient oversight on a process that granted privileged access to customer data. We fixed the problem, promise that your data is safe, and don't believe this will happen again.

2. We had a breach. A factor in this was due to a gap in an existing control around customer data that had a problem we had not anticipated. These were the people involved. This is exactly how this problem occurred. This is the data that was exposed. This is documentation of our response to this incident. This is our existing policy around how we handle data and how we respond to breaches.

Customers, partners, regulators, and law enforcement respond a lot better when you can demonstrate good intent and at least imply that you have some kind of process. Of the two scenarios I outlined, the latter provides those assurances.

Compliance isn't the only way to do this, but it's often the easiest.

You also need a way of recording what changed. when committing to git it's easy, but live eval-ing into prod sounds harder.

Is it any different than any other kind of direct prod access? I mean, you have to have controls for accessing prod, so it seems like you could use similar ones for REPL access, but that's logic and I know that only has a tenuous relationship with compliance...

It is possible to certify Erlang and elixir as fips-140 compliant.

Still wildly useful debugging things locally too!

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