Comment by idle_zealot
5 days ago
> I've moved toward viewing security and quality as sufficiently overlapping that they can be treated as a single area.
Quality implies knowledge, understanding, and the willingness to use them. Security is the same, but for the narrowed domain of security best-practices and common vulnerabilities. It's possible for something superficially high-quality to be insecure, but that implies that whoever made it either has extremely lopsided experience, or left the vulnerabilities in intentionally or knowingly. Of course, security is a particularly tricky domain, so even a fairly talented and good-intentioned developer is likely to make some missteps. Those missteps, I'd say, qualify as lapses in quality. I'd be damned surprised, on the other hand, to find that something low-quality is secure, and would assume that any such security is the product of a happy accident or sheer simplicity of the software, and is more likely than not to be lost as it grows and changes.
This reminds me of Notepad
You mean in the sense that it was secure by virtue of being extremely simple, and lost that security because it grew in complexity without growing in quality?