Comment by Gigachad
12 hours ago
On the other hand, automated fast rollouts leads to a crowdstrike type situation where you brick all the computers of the world immediately.
Imo we are going to have to rely on more layers of security. Systems that are designed to be secure even in the presence of individual vulnerabilities. This has already been happening for a while on mobile platforms and game consoles. Even physical hardware designed to keep particular secrets /keys even from the kernel.
The crowdstrike situation wasn't due to fast rollouts, it was due to a total lack of testing. You can do fast rollouts, with testing, and a mandatory QA signoff. It's called 'continuous delivery' rather than 'continuous deployment'.
I actually don't think more layers of security will fix this. It would be nice if our systems were more secure... but people are, if nothing else, lazy af. Even when adding security isn't a lot of work, people resist it if it "sounds complicated". So I think we're stuck with the status quo. But the big issue now isn't novel bug types, it's the speed in which they're found. Therefore we need to speed up our response.
Lack of care, slip ups, and bugs are basically a constant that will always exist. But we can architect systems which are secure even in the face of bugs. Multiple layers of security mean that even the most critical kernel bug in iOS can never extract your faceid data or encryption key because the hardware physically isn’t capable of it. OSs like Qubes utilise multiple VMs so any kernel bugs have limited reach.
When you look at consoles, they have built software that is resistant to outright glitching the CPU.