Discuss: Cyber Security Sucks

People have been working on computer system security for at least 30 years. During this time there have been many intellectual successes. Notable among them are the subject/object access matrix model, access control lists, multilevel security using information flow and the star-property, public key cryptography, and cryptographic protocols. In spite of these successes, it seems fair to say that in an absolute sense, the security of the hundreds of millions of deployed computer systems is terrible:

a determined and competent attacker could destroy most of the information on almost any of these systems, or steal it from any system that is connected to a network. Even worse, the attacker could do this to millions of systems at once.

How much harm is actually being done by attacks on these insecure systems…;) mEoW mEoW

There is no accurate data about the cost of failures in computer security. On the one hand, most of them are never made public for fear of embarrassment. On the other, when a public incident does occur, the security experts and vendors of antivirus software that talk to the media have every incentive to greatly exaggerate its costs.

But money talks.

Many vendors of security have learned to their regret that although people complain about inadequate security, they won’t spend much money, sacrifice many features, or put up with much inconvenience in order to improve it. This strongly suggests that bad security is not really costing them much.

Of course, computer security is not just about computer systems. We don’t have “real” security that guarantees to stop bad things from happening, and the main reason is that people don’t buy it. They don’t buy it because the danger is small, and because security is a pain.

Since the danger is small, people prefer to buy features. A secure system has fewer features because it has to be implemented correctly. This means that it takes more time to build, so naturally it lacks the latest features.
Security is a pain because it stops you from doing things, and you have to do work to authenticate yourself and to set it up.
A secondary reason we don’t have “real” security is that systems are complicated, and therefore both the code and the setup have bugs that an attacker can exploit. This is the reason that gets all the attention, but it is not the heart of the problem.
Will things get better?
Certainly if there are some major security catastrophes, buyers will change their priorities and systems will become more secure. Short of that, the best we can do is to drastically simplify the parts of systems that have to do with security: