Comment by torginus
2 months ago
Not really, and I kinda envy you that you haven't really worked up close with compliance-related people.
A lot of compliance is basically corruption - while in country A, you might fall out of a window if you don't buy from the right people at 10x prices, but in 'civilized' country B, you have to buy from vendor X (who has the necessary paperwork), at 10x prices, or you wont be able to sell the product - and there are a million ways that they can turn the levers to kick you out of their markets, or at least make you pay protection money to these compliance organizations.
The systems of grift are very sophisticated, and very obvious to anyone but the people perpetuating and participating in them. As they say,iyt is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
A lot of compliance software is griftware - Sonarqube is a prime example - most engineers don't think it adds value, and the 'analysis' it produces is incredibly shoddy, but like a lot of cybersecurity products, it relies on a authoritarian company culture, certification TP conditional on using the software and achieving a good score etc and alarmist language with nice dashboards. A classic example, is it tags public fields in Java as a security issue. And then the management see that you are writing 'insecure code'.
And literal mouthbreathing idiots in upper management eat this shit up, or use it as a punitive measure against the devs who by their very nature do all the meaningful work.
I'm not saying all compliance is worthless, but if you approach quality from first principles, a 'compliant' product usually has to clear a very low bar of quality. And compliance usually keeps the quality low, and prices high, by forcing potential competitors out of the market.
And compliance can keep quality low in other ways, I've seen firsthand - by making devs work on BS tasks, or preventing improvements and fixes to codebases, because they're not tracked appropriately by whatever change management system.
I was incredibly wary of doing hacky solutions in these places, not out of a sense of commitment to quality, but the fact that once management sees your hacks WORK (kinda), all requests to clean up the garbage will be stonewalled.
Thankfully LLMs make this busywork very easy, through making this papermill garbage, and nitpicking busywork very easy, which I feel will bring at least some positive change in the world (at least to those who do meaningful work)
Sonarqube did not flag public fields as a security issue by default the last time I used it — however it has found several real vulnerabilities for me before.
It did by default for me, and there are a bunch of other poorly implemented analyses, such as it incorrectly flagging Dictionary keys in C# as mutable, or opinionated stuff like it disliking certain names and patterns, forcing me to make arbitrary changes that often cost performance, readability or API cleanliness.
Or insane stuff like it doing a blanket-ban on security related code in the app (but importing a third party lib that does the same is fine).
The analyses in general are low quality and you can see not a lot of effort or thought went into them.
They are not the product - compliance, and dashboards for boomers is.
I'm curious about what did it detect for you? In my experience it stops very obvious bad patterns like using string manipulation to submit SQL (which in certain circumstances might even be fine, even necessary), but it can't really trace non-obvious security issues (like tracing a value through the code, making sure its valid on every codepath), it just doesn't have the compiler machinery to do that.
It has found actual reproducible SQL injections for me as well as XXE vulns.
> certification TP conditional on using the software
You’re saying auditors are requiring you to use specific software, or something like that? Sounds like your company picked bad auditors. Compliance auditors don’t normally mandate things like that.
A compliance auditor’s job is to ensure processes meet compliance requirements, not dictate specific tools.
You are confusing two things:
- the requirements.
- the compliance process that makes sure the company members at all level follow the requirements.
Yes, in many topics, particularly in IT, there's no good requirements being enforced, because the people suggesting them are mostly grifters. But that's not a problem with compliance proper, it's simply a garbage in garbage out process.