Comment by wutwutwat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wutwutwat | Hacker News Reader

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I don’t think anyone is concerned about budgets. Having intimate details into the systems of these craft and understanding how they operate in great detail makes it much easier to 1. Copy it, 2. Defend against it, 3. Find critical vulnerabilities in its design, 4. Build offensive systems that take advantage of any shortcomings, 5. Fast tracks their own jet fighter programs (which to your point does affect budgets because someone else had paid for the R&D)

The same is true for any IP/competitive advantage.

It’s funny how in our industry security through obsecurity is a thing we avoid, but other industries are literally built on the foundation of hiding information in order to stay ahead

We avoid it because there are better ways, not because security through obscurity isn't security. Sometimes, obscurity is all you have.

Also because so much of software is uniquely poorly suited to obscurity. Attackers will often be able to probe the "obscure" system at their leisure trying to reverse it, or in non-SAAS cases get their hands on the actual (compiled) algorithm itself. And once you figure it out every single copy works exactly the same.

It's not like trying to measure the penetrating capabilities of a tank round, where you need physical access to a batch of large, expensive, explosive, tightly controlled objects to figure it out.

Everything is open source* if you know assembly, so to speak.

Edit: *source available

At least some classified stuff is well known to other country's intelligence services, friend, neutral, and foe. It can be so far out of the bag, it's had kittens.

Lot of stuff is classified not because it would actually prevent other nations from finding out stuff, but to hide from the American people and press embarrassing things like how much money is being spent on that particular project or weapons system, how much of a failure it has been, how much toxic waste is being created in its manufacture, and so on.

There's also all the stuff Internet Armchair Intelligence Officers think is "sensitive" or "classified."

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