Nothing Is Perfectly Secure
Recently a blog reader asked to enlist my help. He said his colleagues have been arguing in favor of building perfectly secure systems. He replied that you still need the capability to detect and respond to intrusions. The reader wanted to know my thoughts.
I believe that building perfectly secure systems is impossible. No one has ever been able to do it, and no one ever will.
Preventing intrusions is a laudable goal, but I think security is only as sound as one's ability to validate that the system is trustworthy. Trusted != trustworthy.
Even if you only wanted to make sure your "secure" system remains trustworthy, you need to monitor it.
Since history has shown everything can be compromised, your monitoring will likely reveal an intrusion.
Therefore, you will need a detection and a response capability.
If you reject the notion that your "secure" system will be compromised, and thereby reject the need for incident response, you still need a detection capability to validate trustworthiness.
What do you think?
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I believe that building perfectly secure systems is impossible. No one has ever been able to do it, and no one ever will.
Preventing intrusions is a laudable goal, but I think security is only as sound as one's ability to validate that the system is trustworthy. Trusted != trustworthy.
Even if you only wanted to make sure your "secure" system remains trustworthy, you need to monitor it.
Since history has shown everything can be compromised, your monitoring will likely reveal an intrusion.
Therefore, you will need a detection and a response capability.
If you reject the notion that your "secure" system will be compromised, and thereby reject the need for incident response, you still need a detection capability to validate trustworthiness.
What do you think?
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Comments
Everything is made by human beings. And human beings fail, even when you have teams of careful people double-checking each other's work.
To say you'll never fail is classic greek legend hubris.
They are using a belief in what they think makes a "secure system" in order to justify the argument against monitoring. That belief is a matter of faith which is contradicted by the facts.
You can use the same logic against any kind of QA or stress testing in the world. Can you imagine what would happen if Boeing decided that everything they made was so well-engineered that none of it required quality control or any kind of monitoring?
The same argument has been used to hide failures and excuse bad decisions throughout history, and it has always failed.
A "full patched" or "secure" system is so only at that fleeting moment in time. As technology continues to compress space and time, that "full patched and secure" moment grows shorter everyday.
I'm not sure how I'd feel about having to work with someone who doesn't understand that. The job security probably isn't worth the headaches.