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Comment by fc417fc802 | Hacker News Reader

Good read, but:

> This kind of thinking is not natural for most people. It’s not natural for engineers. Good engineering involves ...

I have to disagree in the strongest terms. It doesn't matter what it is, the only way to do a good job designing something is to imagine the ways in which things could go wrong. You have to poke holes in your own design and then fix them rather than leaving it to the real world to tear your project to shreds after the fact.

The same thing applies to science. Any even half decent scientist is constantly attempting to tear his own theories apart.

I think Schneier is correct about that sort of thinking not being natural for your typical person. But it _is_ natural (or rather a prerequisite) for truly competent engineers and scientists.

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hmmm I am 50% with you. Imho to be an amazing engineer is to see a problem and find a good(whatever good means) solution. Beeing a good scientist is asking precise questions and finding experiments validating them.

I think its more the nuanced difference between safety and security. Engineers build things so they run safe. For example building a roof that doesnt collapse is a safe roof. Is the roof secure? Maybe I can put thermites in the wood...

this is the difference. Safety is no harm done from the thing itself Engineers build and security is securing the thing from harm from outside.

Now I'm scared at the idea of termites with thermite!

That is true, but security is similarly subject to the need to constrain threat models to those that are relevant. The scientist doesn't need to worry about mass production, the engineer (in most cases) doesn't need to worry about someone taking a chain saw to it.

Security will have a wider scope by default (unlike natural phenomena, attacks are motivated and can get pretty creative after all) but there will still be some boundary outside of which "not my problem" applies. Regardless, it's the same fundamental thought pattern in use. Repeatedly asking "what did I overlook, what unintended assumptions did I make, how could this break".

That said, admittedly by the time you make it to the scale of Google or Microsoft and are seriously considering intelligence agencies as adversaries the sky is the limit. But then the same sort of "every last detail is always your problem" mentality also applies to the engineers and software developers building things that go to space (for example).

I agree. A good engineer would think about all possible corner cases (). Security is another set of corner cases.

() Just yesterday I had to correct a PR because the engineer did not think of some corner cases. All sorts of corner cases happen in real life.

It wasn't typical in 2008, I think, is the upshot.

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