Comment by Normal_gaussian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Normal_gaussian | Hacker News Reader

Normal_gaussian

There is nothing here that really tells us the turnstile was security theatre? Or the various key card swipes.

There are many ways to skin a cat; and there are many ways to ensure authenticated / trusted access. If you have site wide security gates, it means you know everyone on site / on a given floor conforms to a given minimal security or trust level, so now you can conduct operations in that area with more freedom. This makes the risk assessments for other actions so much simpler. e.g. Now when the apprentice IT tech leaves the SLT's laptop trolley in the corridor it doesn't trigger a reflash of all of the machines. Or when a key individual misplaces their keyfob (e.g. in the kitchen) it doesn't trigger a lockdown of core systems, because they had it on the way in and its reasonable to trust that nobody stole it.

Obviously the implementation was botched in this case - but "feel secure" and "security theatre" are right as often as they are wrong.

It also doesn’t describe any of the why the additional security measures were put in place. It sounds arbitrary, but could be an insurance or regulatory requirement that the acquiring company needed to meet. Similar for the login issue, it’s suboptimal but what constraints caused that solution to be put in place? And why wasn’t it fixed?

Sans context there’s not a lot to complain about here.

> Obviously the implementation was botched in this case

The long wait times could easily have been fixed by staggering employee start times. You could even optimize it per building/floor. Sadly, a lot of bureaucrats lack the imagination to do simple stuff like this. (Anyone with a desperate need to have 9 am meetings would just have to suck it up)

> staggering employee start times

Immediately reminds me of Severance.

Card readers in elevators are theater though. You would need separate vestibules to actually secure entry via elevator. That’s why most buildings have those.

Are they? The goal isn't to draw a hard boundary it's to create layered defenses which increase the difficulty and reduce opportunity.

If instead of open access you need to tailgate on a limited set of employees, that increases difficulty considerably and makes the opportunity much less common.

Real security analysis works this way: you don't assume you can build a wall which is never breached.

I'm not sure the problem with card readers is that it's security theater, so much as it's a really inconvenient place to put the security check so the added security is not at all worthwhile. Putting the card readers on each floor so that you need to swipe immediately after exiting the elevator separates the security check from all the ordinary functions of an elevator, and splits up that security checking across a large number of floors instead of a smaller number of elevators. Everyone still needs to go through the same number of layers of security checks, but those checks aren't being imposed directly on top of what's already a bottleneck.

So the lesson that should be familiar to software developers is: retrofitting security (in the elevator) instead of planning for it from the start (with space for access controls between the elevator and the offices) will tend to make the security more painful than it could have been.

Deviant Ollam talked about elevators a lot. You can have the fire marshal's key or an elevator technician's key and know where the secret panel is to override the controls on any elevator, take it to any floor you want, or even between floors, or tag it out of order and hide in there until everyone else goes home. Any elevator shaft should be treated like a door to the outside world, you never know who could come in from the elevator, even if there's a key card.

You're missing the part about layered controls which is what elevator access control is.

Limiting the number of people who can incidentally travel to and loiter outside your primary office entrance is one level of control - it raises the visiibility of interlopers, and creates an initial barrier to even being near the objective.

Everything else you've listed though is also just a big list of additional breaches and crimes someone would have to commit before they can even get near to the target in the first place - i.e. they're relevant, but if you're ingress plan is "steal a bunch of elevator access keys" then you've already excluded a whole host of simple crimes of opportunity.

You can buy elevator keys for not much money on eBay.

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