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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

> If someone meant to engineer a codebase to hide subtle bugs which might be remotely exploitable, leak state, behave unexpectedly at runtime, or all of the above, the code would look like this.

I wonder who could possibly be incentivized to make the cryptography package used by most of the worlds computers and communications networks full of subtly exploitable hard to find bugs. Surely everyone would want such a key piece of technology to be air tight and easy to debug

But also: surely a technology developed in a highly adversarial environment would be easy to maintain and keep understandable. You definitely would have no reason to play whackamole with random stuff as it arises

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> Surely everyone would want such a key piece of technology to be air tight and easy to debug

1. Tragedy of the Commons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons) / Bystander Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bystander_effect)

2. In practice, the risk of introducing a breakage probably makes upstream averse to refactoring for aesthetics alone; you’d need to prove that there’s a functional bug. But of course, you’re less likely to notice a functional bug if the aesthetic is so bad you can’t follow the code. And when people need a new feature, that will get shoehorned in while changing as little code as possible, because nobody fully understands why everything is there. Especially when execution speed is a potential attack vector.

So maybe shades of the trolley problem too - people would rather passively let multiple bugs exist, than be actively responsible for introducing one.

I wonder what adoption would actually look like.

It reminds me of Google Dart, which was originally pitched as an alternate language that enabled web programming in the style Google likes (strong types etc.). There was a loud cry of scope creep from implementors and undo market influence in places like Hacker News. It was so poorly received that Google rescinded the proposal to make it a peer language to JavaScript.

Granted, the interests point in different directions for security software v.s. a mainstream platform. Still, audiences are quick to question the motives of companies that have the scale to invest in something like making a net-new security runtime.

> undo market influence

Pointless nitpick, but you want "undue market influence." "Undo market influence" is what the FTC orders when they decide there's monopolistic practices going on.

Not pointless. I had no idea what the original wording meant.

> Surely everyone would want such a key piece of technology to be air tight and easy to debug

The incentives of different parties / actors are different. 'Everyone' necessarily comprises an extremely broad category, and we should only invoke that category with care.

I could claim "Everyone" wants banks to be secure - and you would be correct to reject that claim. Note that if the actual sense of the term in that sentence is really "almost everyone, but definitely not everyone", then threat landscape is entirely different.

I read that whole paragraph with a tinge of sarcasm. There's bad actors out there that want to exploit these security vulnerabilities for personal gain and then there's nation-state actors that just want to spy on everyone.

> highly adversarial environment

Except it's not. Literally nobody ever in history had their credit card number stolen because of SSL implementation issues. It's security theater.

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